Leah Deskins ‘21
Professor Liaison Editor
After a successful discussion with Professor Hwang a few weeks ago, the Law Weekly decided to continue its professor interview column with another new faculty member: Professor Megan Stevenson. Devon Chenelle ’23, Dana Lake ’23, and Jacob Jones ’21 joined me, and we all turned on our cameras for a Zoom conversation with Professor Stevenson last week.
Pictured: Professor Megan Stevenson brings a new and invaluable perspective to UVA Law. Photo Courtesy of law.virginia.edu
Professor Stevenson joins the Law School from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. She has three degrees from UC Berkeley, culminating in a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics. After earning her Ph.D., she spent two years as a Quattrone Fellow at UPenn before heading down to the D.C. area, and then, three years later, migrated to Charlottesville. Don’t let her area of study fool you, though. Professor Stevenson’s work and teaching focuses on criminal justice. This semester, she is teaching criminal law, and next semester, she’ll be teaching a seminar titled “Rethinking Criminal Justice.”[1]
I was really excited to meet Professor Stevenson because she has a bit of a unique background compared to many of the other professors at the Law School—she has a Ph.D., but not a J.D.—so I was thrilled when she agreed to join some Law Weekly folks for an interview.
We quickly found out that Professor Stevenson’s approach to the law involves a unique and valuable twist. While Professor Stevenson prepares for class just like other law professors, and she publishes research in journals,[2] she also brings an empirical approach to her work as a result of her training in economics. For example, she is currently researching the collateral consequences of incarceration, including how incarceration affects individuals’ long-term economic well-being. In my opinion, Professor Stevenson’s perspective is invaluable. In a law school environment, it is so easy for students to focus on memorizing “doctrine” at the expense of considering the data that results from the application of that doctrine in the real world. Professor Stevenson’s perspective has the potential to help counteract some of those tendencies here at UVA Law.
We also learned a little about Professor Stevenson’s life outside of the law. In her spare time, she enjoys practicing yoga and doing Pilates workouts. When asked if she has pets, she replied that she doesn’t, but she does have small children. She’s a Schitt’s Creek fan, and she enjoys listening to Motown and R&B. For law students wondering how they can get their urban park and post-Tiger-King big cat fixes in D.C. after law school, you should talk to Professor Stevenson. While teaching at George Mason, she lived near Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo—so close to the Zoo, in fact, that she could hear the lions roar.
In these interviews, I like to ask professors if they have any advice for students. It can be about law school, their career after law school, or life outside the law. I always get great answers, and Professor Stevenson was no different: She suggested that everyone learn about statistics.[3] She explained that we live in an empirical world and that there is great value in being able to discern how statistics are being used around you. To illustrate her point, she asked us to consider a hypothetical in which a community normally has a murder rate of one in 100,000 people per year. She explained that in a given year, if there were two murders, that murder rate would become two in 100,000 people per year—still a very small number that could be explained by random noise. She noted, however, that someone could sensationalize that data by proclaiming that the murder rate DOUBLED that year, and while that claim would be technically correct, someone with a little statistics knowledge would be better equipped to realize that the murder rate was still incredibly small.
Maybe I’m biased—I took a number of statistics classes in college—but I think Professor Stevenson’s advice is excellent and quite topical in light of the current state of the world. With so much information pertaining to so many different issues, and flowing from all kinds of sources (e.g., Instagram), it’s important for law students and non-law students alike to understand how numbers are being used and how different factors affect what’s going on in the world around them.
All in all, it was a real treat to meet Professor Stevenson. I look forward to seeing the impact she has on the Law School community and the legal profession more broadly.
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lcd4ew@virginia.edu
[1] The course description is already on LawWeb, and it looks like it’ll be a great class.
[2] I’ll note that she publishes her work not only in traditional law journals, but also economics journals.
[3] For those of you, dear readers, who are inspired by this advice but don’t know where to turn to learn more about statistics, you’re in luck. Professor Stevenson mentioned that she’ll be teaching a statistics course either this spring or sometime next year.