Bio: Donna Coker, Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law

Professor Coker’s scholarship focuses on criminal law, gender, and race inequality. She is a nationally recognized expert in intimate partner violence (IPV) law and policy. Her research and teaching concern restorative justice and other non-carceral responses to IPV and sexual harm; the connection between economic vulnerability and IPV;  the political economy of the carceral state; prison abolition; and the intersections of gender and race subordination in criminal law doctrine, policy, and application. Professor Coker received her JD from Stanford Law School and her MSW from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Professor Coker frequently serves as an advisor to IPV restorative justice projects including most recently the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery.   She served as the 2022-2023 International Fellow for the Restorative Research,Innovation, and Education Lab at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. She frequently engages students in collaborations with community organizations including most recently Beyond the Bars, a Miami-Dade County organization whose membership are formerly incarcerated persons and their families; the Appalachian Justice Research Center, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Community Safety Toolkit for IPV, in collaboration with Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians stakeholders; and as Co-PI with the Miami-Dade Safety Project of Miami Law’s Human Rights Clinic that elevates the voices of community members in determining county priorities for responding to gender-based violence.