Renée McDonald Hutchins is Maryland Carey Law’s 11th dean, beginning her tenure in 2022. Previously, she was dean at the David A. Clarke School of Law, University of the District of Columbia (UDC) in Washington D.C. from 2019 to 2022.
Before her deanship at UDC, Dean Hutchins was a member of the Maryland Carey Law faculty from 2004 to 2019. In 2004, she founded and taught the Appellate and Post-conviction Advocacy Clinic. She rose to the position of co-director of the Clinical Law Program in 2014 and was named the Jacob A. France Professor of Public Interest Law in 2016.
Dean Hutchins is a leading expert on the Fourth Amendment and criminal appellate practice. Her legal scholarship, which sits at the intersection of criminal procedure and social science, has been published in leading law journals and cited by numerous U.S. Courts of Appeals and state appellate courts. She authored the textbook Developing Professional Skills: Criminal Procedure and is co-author of the textbooks Learning Criminal Procedure and Essential Lawyering Skills. She also has written about racial profiling and the practice of stop-and-frisk and is frequently called upon to provide legal analysis and insight for a variety of media outlets.
Dean Hutchins earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Spelman College, America’s oldest historically Black liberal arts college for women. She went on to receive her JD from Yale Law School, where she was chair of the Moot Court Board of Directors. After law school, she clerked for the late Nathaniel R. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and gained legal experience as a federal prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. She also taught in NYU’s groundbreaking Lawyering Program.
Dean Hutchins completed three four-year terms on the Maryland Appellate Courts Judicial Nominating Commission. Currently, she serves on the board of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. In 2017, she was elected to the prestigious American Law Institute.