Faculty Profile

BIO

Professor Roseanna Sommers’s 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 funded by the National Science Foundation and has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, Psychological Science, Cognition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science. In 2024, Prof. Sommers became the first law professor to receive the SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of social psychology. In 2025, she was designated a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science.

Prior to joining the Michigan Law faculty, Prof. 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.