Overview
Lisa Kern Griffin teaches and writes about constitutional criminal procedure, evidence, and federal criminal justice. Her recent scholarship concerns the criminalization of dishonesty in legal institutions, the treatment of silence in police interrogations, the use of personal history to impeach witnesses, the relationship between court-based accuracy and narrative constructs, and the impact of popular culture about the criminal justice system.
Griffin’s book, Honest Mistakes: Truth, Lies, and the Misleading Law of Questioning, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Her academic articles have appeared in the California Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Georgetown Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Texas Law Review, and the online editions of the Cornell Law Review and the Michigan Law Review, among others. She has also edited and contributed to volumes of Law & Contemporary Problems and authored chapters in several books. Her opinion essays have been published in The Atlantic, Slate, SCOTUSblog, and The New York Times.
Griffin joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008 and is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award and the A. Kenneth Pye Award for Excellence in Education. From 2021-2023, she served as the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. Prior to coming to Duke, she taught at the UCLA School of Law, and she was the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School in 2024. Griffin is also an elected member of the American Law Institute, has filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court, served as a legal advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and has testified before the United States Congress on public corruption prosecutions and proposed revisions to the fraud statutes.
Griffin graduated from Stanford Law School, where she was President of the Stanford Law Review and elected to the Order of the Coif. She served as a federal prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney’s Office and also clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court.