Professor of Law
- PHD, George Washington University
- JD, Harvard Law School
- AB, Harvard College
Professor Sheley is an expert in criminal law who studies the role of narrative in evaluating harm. Before her role at USD Law, she was a professor and assistant dean of research at California Western School of Law, where she taught criminal law, criminal procedure, white collar crime, and evidence. Prior to that, she taught at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, the University of Calgary Faculty of Law, George Washington University Law School, and Georgetown University Law Center.
Professor Sheley has published a book titled Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh University Press), and her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals including the Southern California Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Indiana Law Journal, the BYU Law Review, the Texas A&M Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, the Washington Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
Areas of Expertise
Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure
Scholarly Work
- Familial DNA and Due Process for Innocents, 98 Southern California Law Review 761 (2025)
- Prosecutorial Discretion and Digital Democracy, 113 Kentucky Law Journal 71 (2024)
- Self-Defense and Political Rage, 11 Texas A & M Law Review 591 (2024)
- The Purloined Debtor: Edgar Allan Poe’s Bankruptcy in Law and Letters, 34 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 433 (2023) (with Zvi Rosen)
- Rethinking Coercion-Based Defenses, 112 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 265 (2022) (with Stephen Galoob)
- The Dignitary Confrontation Clause, 97 Washington Law Review 207 (2022)
- Criminalizing Coercive Control Within the Limits of Due Process, 70 Duke Law Journal 1321 (2021)
- Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Edinburgh University Press 2020)
- Victim Impact Statements and Corporate Sex Crimes, 73 Oklahoma Law Review 209 (2020)
- Tort Answers to the Problem of Corporate Criminal Mens Rea, 97 North Carolina Law Review 773 (2019)
- A Broken Windows Theory of Sexual Assault Enforcement, 108 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101 (2018)
- Substantive and Procedural Silence, 84 Tennessee Law Review 447 (2017)
- Victim Impact Statements and Expressive Punishment in the Age of Social Media, 52 Wake Forest Law Review 157 (2017)
- Prospective Injunctive Relief and Class Action Settlements, 39 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 769 (2016) (with Theodore Frank)
- Rethinking Injury: the Case of Informed Consent, 2015 Brigham Young University Law Review 63 (2015)
- Perceptual Harm and the Corporate Criminal , 81 University of Cincinnati Law Review 225 (2013)
- Reverberations of the ‘Victim’s Voice’: Victim Impact Statements and the Cultural Project of Punishment, 87 Indiana Law Journal 1247 (2012)
- The Constable’s Blunder and Other Stories: Narrative Representations of the Police and the Criminal in the Development of the Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule, 2010 Michigan State Law Review 121 (2010)
- Live Animals: Towards Protection for Pets and Livestock in Contracts for Carriage, 3 Journal of Animal Law 59 (2007)