Theresa A. Newman
Clinical Professor of Law
Theresa Newman is a clinical professor of law, co-director of the Wrongful Convictions Clinic (with Professor James Coleman), associate director of the Duke Law School Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, and faculty adviser to the student-led Innocence Project. She was associate dean for academic affairs from 1999-2008, director of the Legal Writing Program from 1994-1999, and general editor of Law and Contemporary Problems from 1990-2001.
Until recently, Newman served as president of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, a nonprofit organization she helped found, which is dedicated to assisting wrongly convicted North Carolina inmates obtain relief. She has also served as a member of the North Carolina Chief Justice's Criminal Justice Study Commission (formerly the Commission on Actual Innocence). For a number of years, until the spring of 2009, Newman also served as president of the Innocence Network, an affiliation of more than sixty organizations dedicated to providing pro bono legal and investigative services to individuals seeking to prove their innocence and working to redress the causes of wrongful convictions. She remains on the Network board.
Newman received her JD from Duke in 1988. She clerked for the Honorable J. Dickson Phillips, Jr., on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the first year after graduation and then practiced in the civil litigation group of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Raleigh, N.C.
