Professor Nancy S. Marder, director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center at Chicago-Kent College of Law, has been selected as a senior fellow of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy. Housed at the University at Buffalo School of Law, the Baldy Center supports interdisciplinary research on law, legal institutions, and social policy.

Marder is spending the spring 2019 semester at the Baldy Center. During that time, she will finish her new book, The Power of the Jury: Transforming Citizens into Jurors, which will examine how every stage of the jury process—from voir dire to post-verdict interviews—helps to transform ordinary citizens into responsible jurors.

An internationally recognized expert on juries, judges, courts and trials, Marder has served since 2003 as professor/reporter for the Illinois Supreme Court Committee on Jury Instructions in Civil Cases. She has drafted jury instructions for the ABA and for Illinois, advocated successfully for rule changes affecting jurors in Illinois, given public testimony for proposed jury reforms, and served as a member on various jury advisory committees. Marder is the author of the book The Jury Process (2005) and more than 40 articles and book chapters, as well as 40 essays and book reviews.

A member of the Chicago-Kent faculty since 1999, Marder teaches a course at Chicago-Kent called Juries, Judges & Trials, as well as a course on Legislation and another on Law, Literature & Feminism. She is a member of the American Law Institute and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens from 1990 to 1992. Marder has a B.A. (summa cum laude) in English and Afro-American Studies from Yale College; a M.Phil. in International  Relations from Cambridge University, where she was a Mellon Fellow; and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal.