Perry Moriearty

Perry Moriearty is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, with expertise in clinical legal education and juvenile justice. She teaches criminal law, race and the law, and co-directs the Child Advocacy and Juvenile Justice Clinic. Before joining the University of Minnesota, Perry taught at the University of Denver and the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

Over the last several years, Perry has led her child advocacy and juvenile justice clinic in work related to Miller v. Alabama, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole were unconstitutional for juvenile defendants. Perry has also offered critical examinations of the 1990s preoccupation with so-called “juvenile superpredators” and the corresponding increase in racial disparities in juvenile confinement.

Perry received a B.A. with honors in English and American Literature from Brown University and a J.D. from New York University. She spent five years as an associate with Ropes & Gray in Boston, specializing in civil litigation, labor and employment, and white-collar criminal defense matters, and a year with the Juvenile Defense Network, a project of the juvenile division of the public defender’s office focused on training juvenile defenders throughout Massachusetts.

Perry serves on the boards of the McKnight Foundation and the Clinical Legal Education Association. She has worked closely with legal services and grassroots organizations assisting underserved juvenile populations throughout her career and has been actively involved in the passage of several pieces of legislation.