USD School of Law Professor Rebecca Talbott Wins AALS Junior Scholars Paper Competition Award
SAN DIEGO (December 16, 2025) – University of San Diego (USD) School of Law congratulates Assistant Professor of Law Rebecca Talbott, who was selected by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) as the 2026 winner of the Junior Scholars Paper Competition Award for the section on Criminal Procedure.
The award-winning article is called, “Implied Promises in Police Interrogation,” forthcoming in the UC Davis Law Review. The article examines a pervasive but underappreciated aspect of how police pressure suspects in the United States to confess to crimes: by communicating to them that unless they confess right then to police, they will forever forfeit any hopes of leniency in the criminal legal system. She argues that this message not only is legally incorrect but also, under the circumstances, amounts to unconstitutional compulsion in violation of the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination. Talbott states, "In light of the drastic consequences for both criminal suspects and the integrity of our legal system, it is remarkable how little law or oversight applies to the tactics police use to pressure suspects to confess to crimes. I hope to bring more legalistic rigor to this enormously consequential institution."
AALS presents awards through its 108 sections, communities that are organized by subject matter, administrative area, and affinity. This year’s section honorees will be recognized at the AALS Annual Meeting on January 9, 2026, in New Orleans.
A criminal procedure and evidence scholar, Talbott’s work focuses on the constitutional limits on interrogation and the right against compelled self-incrimination. Before joining USD Law, she was a fellow and acting executive director at Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center and taught legal analysis, research, and writing at the University of Washington School of Law. She clerked for the Honorable Stanley Marcus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and the Honorable John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Talbott also practiced with the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Baltimore, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel in New York, and MacDonald Hoague & Bayless in Seattle.
Talbott earned her JD, magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern public interest scholar and Furman Scholar, and received the Judge Abraham Lieberman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Criminal Law. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the NYU Law Review, UC Davis Law Review, and the Washington State Bar News.
About the University of San Diego School of Law
Each year, USD educates approximately 800 Juris Doctor and graduate law students from throughout the United States and around the world. The law school is best known for its offerings in the areas of business and corporate law, constitutional law, intellectual property, international and comparative law, public interest law and taxation.
USD School of Law is one of the 88 law schools elected to the Order of the Coif, a national honor society for law school graduates. The law school’s faculty is a strong group of outstanding scholars and teachers with national and international reputations and currently ranks 34th nationally among U.S. law faculties in scholarly impact and 35th nationally in past-year faculty downloads on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). The school is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Founded in 1954, the law school is part of the University of San Diego, a private, independent, Roman Catholic university chartered in 1949.