In-Person Spring Class Visit: Evidence with Professor Tamara Lave

This event is intended for prospective JD students for the University of Miami School of Law. As space is limited, we can only accommodate up to 5 students per class. Also, students are only allowed to attend once per class offering.

This 4-credit Evidence course is designed for students interested in litigation. Although it is in many ways a traditional course, we will discuss evidence law from a strategic perspective – as litigators trying to enter or exclude certain evidence. To that end, students will be required to analyze hypotheticals and stand and make oral arguments. Substantively, the course will cover the law of evidence as applied in both civil and criminal proceedings throughout the United States. The focus will be on the Federal Rules of Evidence, which now have been adopted through codification in the vast majority of states. These will be examined in detail with reference both to their common law background and to their subsequent interpretation.

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Professor Lave was a deputy public defender for ten years in San Diego, California. As a P.D., she handled a variety of cases, including possession of a spiny lobster out of season, torture, child molestation, rape, and M**der. She also represented accused sexually violent predators in civil commitment hearings. Early in her career, Lave published a My Turn column in Newsweek magazine about being a beginning public defender.

In 2005, Professor Lave left the public defender's office to start a doctoral program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy – an interdisciplinary law and society program – at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, she was a graduate student fellow at the Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs. Her dissertation is entitled "Constructing and Controlling the Sexually Violent Predator: An American Obsession."

Lave teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, criminal procedure adjudication, and evidence. She cares deeply about teaching and mentoring students. She is the 2018 recipient of the Hausler Golden Apple Award, given to the faculty member contributes the most to the student body academically and through her extracurricular activities. In 2016, she received the Mary E. Doyle Leadership award from Miami Law Women, the law student division of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers.

Professor Lave’s primary areas of research are campus sexual misconduct, the punishment and control of sex offenders, and more recently, policing. She has published over twenty-three academic articles or book chapters, of which five are co-authored. She has published opinion pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Persuasion, and the Huffington Post. Lave has been a peer reviewer for a number of journals including the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Yale Law Journal.

Host or Publisher University of Miami School of Law