Avani Mehta Sood will join the NYU Law faculty as a professor of law on July 1, Dean Trevor Morrison announced in April. She will also be an affiliate of NYU’s Department of Psychology.
Sood, a social psychologist and legal scholar, was most recently on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, which she joined in 2013. She teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, the Colloquium on Law & Psychology, and a seminar on Psychological Dimensions of Criminal Law. Sood was a visiting professor at NYU Law in Spring 2021, and visited Cornell Law School and the University of Chicago Law School during the current academic year.
In her scholarship, Sood uses empirical methodologies, psychology theory, and legal analysis to examine how legal decision makers form judgments about criminal evidence, liability, and punishment. She has published her work in the Stanford Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, Georgetown Law Journal, California Law Review, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Theoretical Inquiries in Law; her latest article analyzing verdict format in criminal jury trials is forthcoming in the NYU Law Review.
Sood earned a JD from Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, and an MA and PhD in psychology from Princeton University. Before entering legal academia, she was a clerk to Judge Kimba Wood of the US District Court of the Southern District of New York and a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. She also worked as a legal fellow in the International Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights, through which she conducted field research and trainings on legal mechanisms for redressing women’s rights violations in India and Kenya.
“Avani is an accomplished interdisciplinary scholar whose pathbreaking insights into the relationship between psychology and criminal justice will further enhance NYU Law’s robust expertise in criminal law,” says Morrison. “We are delighted to have her join our faculty.”
Posted May 4, 2022