Amber Baylor
- Clinical Professor of Law
Education
LL.M., Georgetown University Law Center, 2015
J.D., New York University School of Law, 2006
B.A., Columbia University, 2002
Areas of Study
Amber Baylor is the founding director of the Criminal Defense Clinic, which focuses on individual defense representation in local criminal charges and representation of grassroots organizations in criminal law policy projects. Her work centers on local criminal regulation and its impact on communities targeted by intensive policing. Her scholarship continues on this theme. Baylor writes about drug war repair, the impact of protest regulation on everyday life, repair for criminalization of students, historic advocacy in women’s prisons, women and pretrial detention, and the impact of trauma from pretrial detention.
Before joining the Law School in 2021, Baylor was the founder and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Texas A&M School of Law. The clinic provides defense in Texas municipal criminal courts and works with clients and advocates as counsel on federal clemency and compassionate release campaigns.
Baylor has been a visiting assistant professor in the Veterans Law Clinic at Widener University Delaware Law School and a clinical teaching fellow and supervising attorney at Georgetown Law’s Community Justice Project clinic. Baylor is a former fellow of The International Legal Foundation, where she worked with public defenders in Palestine. Prior to teaching, Baylor was a staff attorney with Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and a trial attorney for Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc.
Publications
- “Drug War Repair Guarantees,” 83 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 33 (2026)
- “Unexceptional Protest,” 70 UCLA L. Rev. 716 (2023)
- “Criminalized Students, Reparations, and the Limits of Prospective Reform,” 99 WASH. U. L. Rev. 1 (2021)
- “Design Justice and Municipal Criminal Law,” 51 N.M. L. REV. 163 (2021)
- “Boynton v. Virginia and the Anxieties of the Modern African-American Consumer,” STETSON L. REV. (2019)
- “Centering Women in Prisoners’ Rights Litigation,” 25 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 109 (2018).
- “Developing a Pedagogy of Beneficiary Accountability in the Representation of Social Justice Non-Profit Organizations,” 45 SW. L. REV. 825 (2016) (with Daria Fisher Page).
- “#SayHerName Captured: Updates on Use of Video in Challenging Law Enforcement Violence Against Women,” ABA, THE STATE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE 2016, Ch. 10 (2016)
- “Beyond the Visiting Room: A Defense Counsel Challenge to Conditions in Pretrial Confinement,” 14 CARDOZO PUB. L. POL’Y & ETHICS J. 1 (2015)
- “Changing Punishments for Property Offenses, to Change the Lives of Women in Need,” ABA, THE STATE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE 2015, Ch. 12 (2015)
- “A Free Start: Community-based Organizations as Antidote to the Mass Incarceration of Women Pretrial,” 21 HASTINGS WOMEN’S L.J. 51 (2015)
