Profile

Justin Murray joined New York Law School as an Associate Professor of Law in 2019. He teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and race, bias, and advocacy. He also co-directs NYLS's Criminal Justice Institute.

Professor Murray's scholarship focuses on prosecutorial discretion and on strategies for preventing and penalizing illegal conduct on the part of prosecutors and other criminal justice actors. His academic work has been published in a number of law journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Fordham Law Review. His scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and by judges on other courts, and he received the Otto Walter Award for best article by a full-time faculty member from the NYLS faculty for his 2021 article, "Policing Procedural Error in the Lower Criminal Courts."

In addition, Professor Murray is Chair Elect of the Association of American Law Schools Criminal Procedure Section, a member of the Advisory Board for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, and a member of the planning committee for the Decarceration Law Professors group, among other institutional and service roles.

Professor Murray began his career as a clerk on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After that, he spent four years as an appellate lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, followed by a year at the Consumer Fraud Bureau of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. He then left legal practice to serve as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he taught legal research and writing, before joining NYLS’s faculty.

He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Dr. Sarah Murray, and their three children, David, Katelyn, and Luke.