Dear UMB Community:

It is my pleasure to share the news that Renée McDonald Hutchins, JD, will be the next dean of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, effective Aug. 1, 2022. She is currently dean and professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law. 

Dean Hutchins will be returning “home” to Maryland Carey Law, which she left in 2019 after serving 14 years on the faculty including as the Jacob A. France Professor of Public Interest Law, co-director of the Clinical Law Program, and founding director of the Appellate and Post-Conviction Advocacy Clinic 

She 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 been cited by numerous U.S. Courts of Appeals and state appellate courts.

She wrote the casebook “Developing Professional Skills: Criminal Procedure” and was co-author of the casebook “Learning Criminal Procedure.” She also has written about racial profiling and the practice of stop-and-frisk, has a long record of supporting faculty scholarship, and has provided legal analysis and insight for media outlets such as MSNBC, Voice of America, and C-SPAN.

In 2017, Dean Hutchins was elected to the prestigious American Law Institute, a national association of distinguished lawyers, judges, and academics that works to clarify and improve the law through the publication of restatements of the law and model codes. She has extensive experience spanning federal and state courts across the nation, including the high courts of Maryland and New York, and is serving her third four-year term on Maryland’s Appellate Courts Judicial Nominating Commission.

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, and then clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit 

I am confident that she will continue to move Maryland Carey Law forward in its trajectory. I want to thank those who participated in our comprehensive national search, especially the search committee chaired by Roger J. Ward, EdD, JD, MSL, MPA, provost, executive vice president, and dean of the Graduate School, and co-chaired by Leslie Meltzer Henry, PhD, JD, MSc, professor of law.

I know that you will join me in welcoming Dean Hutchins back to UMB.

Sincerely,

Bruce E. Jarrell, MD, FACS

President