Maybell Romero

Maybell Romero is the McGlinchey Stafford Associate Professor of Law at Tulane Law School. She has established herself as a leading expert on criminal law, prosecutorial professional responsibility and ethics, and rural criminal legal systems. She teaches criminal law, criminal adjudication, a seminar on legal ethics in the criminal legal system, and a class on children and the law.

Her scholarship has featured or is forthcoming in a variety of publications, including the Virginia Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Washington University Law Review, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the University of Chicago Law Review Online, and the American Criminal Law Review. While much of her writing has focused on critiques of the criminal legal system, particularly employing a public choice theory lens, Professor Romero more recently uses unorthodox methods to write about rape and sexual assault law, particularly employing her own experience of sexual assault and being trafficked, in autoethnographic methods as well as engaging in art and other cultural criticism. She is also a leader in professional associations, previously serving as the chair of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Criminal Law as well as the Section for New Law Professors.

From 2017-2021 she taught criminal law, criminal adjudication, and constitutional law at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois and before that she was a visiting assistant professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Prior to joining academia, Professor Romero was a general practitioner in a small law firm in Northern Utah for six years and was a criminal prosecutor for three years. During her nine years of full-time practice, Professor Romero was the director of a charity that helped to provide shelter, medical care, and other resources to individuals struggling with substance use disorder, helped establish one of the first juvenile mental health courts in the state, and served on multiple state Supreme Court committees and advisory boards.

Professor Romero received her B.A. from Cornell University and her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she was the editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law. She spent her childhood in Long Beach, California. She is a first-generation high school, college, and law school graduate and is proudly Latina.