Michael Pinard is the Francis & Harriet Iglehart Professor of Law and faculty director of the Gibson-Banks Center for Race and the Law, which launched in October 2023. Professor Pinard writes and teaches broadly about race, intersectionality, and the criminal legal system, including the criminalization of race (children, adults, and communities); policing; incarceration; criminal records; exclusionary school discipline of K-12 students; and the intersectional harms of the criminal and civil legal systems.
Professor Pinard currently teaches the Youth, Education, and Justice Clinic, in which he and his students represent children who have been pushed out of school through suspension, expulsion, and other means as well as individuals serving life sentences for offenses that occurred when they were children or young adults. The clinic also works on policy and legislative initiatives aimed to keep children in school (and away from the youth/criminal legal systems) and to provide (and broaden) meaningful opportunities for release from incarceration. Professor Pinard has also taught the Reentry Clinic; Law and Social Change (1L elective); Policing, Communities, and the Law; the Permanence of Criminal Records; Freddie Gray’s Baltimore: Past, Present and Moving Forward (with colleagues); Criminal Procedure; Criminal Procedure II; Legal Profession; the Criminal Defense Clinic; and Comparative Criminal Process (Aberdeen, Scotland).
Professor Pinard has worked to improve the criminal legal system nationally and locally through legislative and policy advocacy, scholarship, opinion pieces, and participation in various working and advisory groups. Most recently, he served on the transition team for Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown as co-lead of the Public Safety Team.
Professor Pinard has been active nationally in efforts to improve legal education. He is co-editor-in-chief of the Clinical Law Review. He has chaired the AALS Section on Civil Rights and co-chaired the AALS Section on Litigation, was president of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), has served the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education as co-chair of the Clinical Scholarship Committee and chair of the Nominations Committee, and has served the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar as member of the Clinical Skills Committee.
Professor Pinard currently serves on the board of directors of the Gault Center, the leadership council of the Public Justice Center, and as a commissioner with the Maryland Access to Justice Commission. He has served as a board member of the Public Justice Center, an advisory committee member of the Maryland Reentry Partnership and the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and as chair of the Maryland State Bar Association’s Legal Education and Bar Admission’s Committee.
In 2013, Professor Pinard was elected to the American Law Institute. In 2011, he was honored as a Champion of Change by the White House for his work on behalf of individuals with a criminal record and, in 2008, he received the Shanara Gilbert Award from the Clinical Section of the Association of American Law School as an emerging clinical law professor committed to teaching and achieving social justice.
Professor Pinard received his juris doctor from New York University School of Law. He was a staff attorney with the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City. From 1998 to 2000, he was a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to coming to Maryland in 2002, he was an assistant professor at St. John's University Law School and a visiting associate professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. From 2008 to 2009, he was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law. In spring 2015, he was a scholar-in-residence at Columbia Law School.