Kimberly Kessler Ferzan L’95

Kimberly Kessler Ferzan joined the Law School in 2020, after serving on the University of Virginia faculty, where she was the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law and the Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law.

Ferzan teaches criminal law, evidence, advanced criminal law, and advanced law and philosophy seminars. Ferzan’s work focuses on criminal law theory. She is the co-editor in chief of Law and Philosophy, and is also on the editorial boards of the Stanford Encylopedia for Philosophy (Philosophy of Law), Legal Theory, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, and Criminal Law and Philosophy.

She is the author of numerous articles, the co-editor of three books, and the co-author of Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law (Cambridge University Press), with Larry Alexander and Stephen Morse, and Rethinking Crime and Culpability (Cambridge University Press), with Larry Alexander. Her paper, “Beyond Crime and Commitment,” was selected for the 2013 American Philosophical Association’s Berger Memorial Prize, for the best paper written in law and philosophy for the prior two years, and her paper, “Beyond Intention,” was selected for the 2006 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in the category of criminal law. Prior to joining the Virginia faculty in 2014, Ferzan was on the Rutgers University faculty for 14 years.

Before teaching, Ferzan clerked for Judge Marvin Katz in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and then worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Public Integrity Section, investigating and prosecuting criminal offenses committed by federal, state and local officials. She also served as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. She has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, Harvard, the University of Illinois, and the University of Chicago. She has also been an academic visitor at Australia National University, an international visiting fellow at the University of Warwick, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values.