Professor Michelle Dempsey is Selected as an Honoree in the “Irish Legal 100”, an Award Ceremony Held by The Irish Voice
The annual “Irish Legal 100” is in its fourth year and celebrates distinguished legal professionals with Irish heritage in an award ceremony. Each January, a team of researchers at The Irish Voice work closely with various law schools across the U.S., Irish American bar associations, past members, and sift through law books such as The Best Lawyers in America and Chambers USA to create this distinguished list.
Professor Dempsey is a stellar example of the type of legal professional The Irish Voice wanted to honor. When asked what this award means to her, she said, "I'm delighted to have been selected as one of this year's “Irish Legal 100”. Attending the reception at Irish Ambassador's residence and having the opportunity to meet leading members of the Irish legal community was a great honor - and impressed upon me the important contributions the Irish have made to all aspects of the legal profession in America. I'm especially grateful to my grandfather, William Madden, one of 18 siblings, who left County Mayo, Ireland for America in the early 1900s, in hopes of providing a better life for his family."
In 2010, Professor Dempsey testified as an expert witness before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs regarding chronic failure to report and investigate rape in the U.S. She has also served as an expert witness and consultant to the Crown Prosecution Service of England and Wales with regard to domestic violence prosecutions.
Her book, Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis, published by Oxford University Press in 2009, was awarded second prize in the UK’s Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Award for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Her writings have been published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Modern Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Theoretical Criminology, and Criminal Law Review.
Professor Dempsey has been elected as Secretary of the AALS Section on Scholarship. She is also a member of the AALS Jurisprudence Section Executive Board and
has been quoted several times in the Christian Science Monitor. Earlier this year, Professor Dempsey presented a paper, “Vice Crimes, Victimless Conduct, and the Volenti Maxim”, at the University of Oxford Centre for Criminology. At the invitation of the University of Oxford faculty of law, she examined a doctoral candidate on a thesis entitled, “Securitization and Construction of Masculinities in US Anti-Trafficking Policy 1999-2011.”
Prior to joining Villanova Law in 2009 as an associate professor, Professor Dempsey was a university lecturer in law and a tutorial fellow at Oxford University. She teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, feminist legal theory, and jurisprudence. Professor Dempsey received her B.A. from the University of Illinois, her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, her LL.M. from the London School of Economics, and her D. Phil. (Ph.D.) from Oxford University. Following law school, she worked as a prosecutor in the Champaign (Illinois) County State's Attorney's Office and later as a civil trial lawyer in Chicago. She was a tutor in law at University College London before joining the Oxford faculty in 2005.
