Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She began her career at The University of Chicago Law School in 1995. She was the first Black woman to be granted tenure at both law schools. Her teaching and research interests focus on criminal procedure and criminal law policy with a particular emphasis on the relationship between criminal legal institutions and citizenship. At the federal level, she has served on the Committee on Law and Justice at the National Academy of Sciences, and President Obama named her as a member of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing in 2014. Closer to home, she serves as a police commissioner for New Haven. Professor Meares was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and named the Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Academy of Political of Social Science in 2024. She has a B.S. in general engineering from the University of Illinois and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.