Dr. Lisa Griffin

Biography

Lisa Kern Griffin teaches and writes about constitutional criminal procedure, evidence, and federal criminal justice. Her recent scholarship focuses on the criminalization of dishonesty by legal institutions, treatment of silence during 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 on the criminal justice system. Griffin authored the book, Honest Mistakes: Truth, Lies, Misleading Law Questioning, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Her academic articles have been published in prominent law reviews including California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, New York University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, and Stanford Law Review, as well as online editions of Cornell Law Review and Michigan Law Review. Griffin has contributed to edited volumes and authored chapters in scholarly books. Additionally, her opinion essays have appeared in publications like Atlantic, Slate, and SCOTUSblog. Since joining the Duke Law faculty in 2008, Griffin has received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Kenneth Pye Award for Excellence in Education. From 2021 to 2023, she served as Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Research. Prior to her tenure at Duke, she taught at UCLA School of Law as the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law and held a position at Harvard Law School. Griffin is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court. She served as a legal advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and has testified before the United States Congress regarding public corruption prosecutions and proposed revisions to fraud statutes. Griffin graduated from Stanford Law School where she was the President of the Stanford Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. She has experience as a federal prosecutor in the Chicago United States Attorney’s Office and has 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.

Research Interests