Professor Lynn Branham’s expertise centers on restorative justice as well as sentencing, correctional law, and policy. In addition to her recently published casebook on sentencing law and policy, her current research focuses on the integration of restorative justice into criminal-justice systems and communities’ responses to crime. Her most recent article, published in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy in 2024, spotlights seven core concerns about the Model Penal Code: Sentencing’s approach to restorative justice.
The article concludes with recommendations for the drafting of a Model Restorative Justice Act to guide jurisdictions in the drafting of their own restorative-justice laws. Through her scholarship, a podcast, and speeches at national conferences, she has also explored and challenged the systemic failure to understand and meet the full breadth of victim-survivors’ needs, calling for the law to grant victim-survivors a new legal right – a right of access to restorative-justice processes.
Professor Branham has held multiple leadership positions in the American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) Criminal Justice Section and served on the Commission on Accreditation for Corrections for 16 years, 14 years as the ABA’s representative. She received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and a Master of Science in Restorative Practices from the IIRP Graduate School.
Board member since 2020.
