Shirin Bakhshay’s scholarship focuses on a criminal justice and penal reform. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she employs a socio-psychological lens to understand criminal justice attitudes, norms, and institutions and inform criminal justice and sentencing policy. Her current work combines empirical research findings and critical analyses of sentencing and diversion practices to address punitive sentencing laws and advocate for greater use of alternatives to incarceration, such as restorative justice approaches. Shirin has received a number of grants and awards for her work and has been published in outlets such as Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law and The Prison Journal.

Shirin earned her JD from Yale Law School and her PhD in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz. She holds a BA in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Previously, Shirin was a litigator at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in San Francisco where her work focused on white collar criminal defense and criminal appeals.

She currently teaches legal research and writing and federal litigation in a global context.