Shima Baradaran

Shima Baradaran is a law professor specializing in criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence law, and international law. She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Baradaran was born in Orumieh, Iran in 1979 and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1986. Her sister Mehrsa Baradaran is also a law professor.

She graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and then finished first in her class from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU in 2004. She was the editor in chief of the BYU Law Review from 2003 to 2004. She was a Fulbright senior scholar in Africa researching pretrial detention in Malawi and lecturing in criminal law at the University of Malawi.

She is an associate professor in the College of Law of the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at the U of U, she taught law for three years at BYU. Students voted her professor of the year in 2013. Shima and Mehrsa Baradaran were the first siblings in the BYU law school's 37-year history to simultaneously work as tenure-track faculty.

Baradaran serves as Chair of the Association of American Law School Law and Social Sciences Section and as Secretary of the AALS Criminal Justice Section Executive Committee. Baradaran also has chaired the American Bar Association Pretrial Justice Taskforce and Co-chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention, Pretrial Release and Police Practices.

She was a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York and received national press for her role in prison reform litigation. She also clerked for Judge Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2004 to 2005.

She and her husband, Jeff Robison, have two children.