Nancy King, who held the Lee S. and Charles A. Speir Professor of Law from 2003 to 2024, has retired from the Vanderbilt Law Faculty, effective January 1, 2025. King is a nationally renowned expert in criminal procedure, ranking among the most-cited criminal law professors in the U.S.
“Through her scholarship and teaching, Nancy King has profoundly impacted the way that we think about and teach criminal law in America, and decades of Vanderbilt law students have benefitted from her instruction,” said Dean Chris Guthrie. “We are grateful for her service at the law school and her contributions to the legal field.”
King joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 1991 as an Assistant Professor. She served as Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development from 1999-2001.
King earned the University’s Distinguished Faculty Award in 2003, the Chancellor’s Award for Research in 2005, and the Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor Award – given each year to a single faculty member whose research has made distinctive contributions to the understanding of contemporary society – in 2010. She held the FedEx Research Chair at the Law School in 2001.
Over the course of her academic career, King has authored or co-authored two leading multi-volume treatises on criminal procedure, the leading criminal procedure casebook, dozens of articles and book chapters, and several books, including Habeas for the Twenty-First Century: Uses, Abuses and the Future of the Great Writ. Her articles have been published in the Yale Law Journal, Duke Law Journal, and Stanford, UCLA, and Vanderbilt Law Reviews, among many others.
King is an Associate Reporter for and former member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and a member of the American Law Institute. She was Touroff-Glueck Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in fall 2015.
Prior to entering the legal academy, King served as a law clerk for Judge Douglas W. Hillman, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, and Judge Michael F. Cavanagh, Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. She earned her J.D. from the University of Michigan, where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif.
King was affiliated with the Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program and Criminal Justice Program. She taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure: Adjudication, White Collar Crime Seminar, and Sentencing, among other courses.
Source: https://law.vanderbilt.edu/nancy-king-retires-from-vanderbilt-law-faculty-takes-emerita-status/
