A commitment to making the law work for people in their full humanity runs through all of Carr’s work: her ongoing representation of trafficking survivors, her focus on how AI can expand access to justice, and her efforts to help lawyers and judges sustain themselves in demanding, high-stakes practice.
Carr founded Michigan Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic in 2009, the nation’s first clinical law program devoted to providing comprehensive legal representation to trafficking survivors. Since then, she and her students have represented hundreds of men, women, and children—both US citizens and foreign nationals—navigating the complex aftermath of labor and sex trafficking. The clinic is known not only for its legal outcomes, but also for its commitment to building trust, maintaining long-term relationships with clients, and addressing the full range of needs that trafficking survivors face.
Using the Michigan clinic as a model, Carr worked with university partners to establish human trafficking law clinics in Mexico, Ethiopia, and Brazil, building a global network of legal experts equipped to address compelled service across international borders. She is the lead author of the first casebook on human trafficking law and policy, a text that examines the intersection of criminal justice, civil and human rights, immigration, and international law.
Today, Carr brings that same human-centered perspective to her work in AI and legal technology. As co-director of the AI Law and Policy Clinic, she and her colleague Vivek Sankaran, ’01, guide law students in exploring how artificial intelligence can improve legal practice and expand access to justice, not simply by increasing efficiency, but by creating opportunities to reach the people that current legal systems have been unable to serve.
Carr is equally committed to the well-being of legal professionals doing difficult, high-stakes work. Together with Sankaran, she created Designing a Fulfilling Life in the Law, a course that applies design thinking principles to help students reflect on what they want from their careers and lives and build a framework for getting there. Carr, Sankaran, and colleague Rick Barinbaum also co-led Michigan’s first Judicial Compassion Retreat, a two-day gathering where judges stepped away from their courtrooms to share the emotional weight of their work and explore how to sustain themselves in it.
Carr regularly provides training on human trafficking and trauma-informed practice to law enforcement, government officials, and health care providers, and serves as an expert witness in trafficking cases. She is a member of the Michigan Human Trafficking Taskforce and was appointed to Michigan’s first Commission on Human Trafficking in 2013. She has served as a consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on criminal justice for victims of human trafficking and migrant smuggling.
She has appeared as an expert on the Today Show, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, and has been quoted in the New York Times and many other news outlets. In 2014, she received the Champion of Justice award from the State Bar of Michigan.
During law school, she was a Michigan refugee and asylum law fellow with Amnesty International. Before joining the Law School faculty, she was an associate clinical professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where she led the Immigrant Rights Project. In 2008, she was awarded a Marshall Memorial Fellowship to study human trafficking issues in Europe.
