Roseanna Sommers

Roseanna Sommers is a professor of law at the University of Michigan whose teaching and research interests revolve around the many ways in which the law misunderstands people and people misunderstand the law.

Sommers’s research examines people’s intuitions about legal concepts such as consent, autonomy, and moral responsibility. Her work is part of a growing interdisciplinary field known as experimental jurisprudence, which borrows empirical techniques from the social sciences to clarify core concepts in the law.

Her work asks questions like: How do people determine whether someone is acting voluntarily? How do we think about interferences to autonomy, such as coercion, deception, incapacity, and manipulation? Are our legal doctrines defensible in light of empirical insights from the social and cognitive sciences?

Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science, as well as in law reviews such as the Yale Law Journal and the Stanford Law Review. She is currently co-leading a study funded by the National Science Foundation on the psychology of compliance.

Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, Sommers taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow. She is the founder and director of the Psychology and Law Studies (PALS) Lab, which conducts original research at the intersection of psychology and law. She also co-organizes the Chicago/Michigan PALS speaker series, a virtual workshop hosted in collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School.