Allison Larsen

Professor Allison Larsen is a professor of law at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg Virginia.  She graduated from William & Mary as an undergraduate in 1999, and then received her law degree in 2004 from the University of Virginia School of Law where she graduated first in her class.  After law school, Professor Larsen clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Prior to joining the William and Mary faculty, Professor Larsen was an associate in the appellate practice group at O’Melveny and Myers in Washington DC. 

She teaches constitutional law, administrative law, and statutory interpretation.  Larsen has received four prestigious teaching awards since joining the faculty in 2010, including a state-wide “outstanding faculty award” recognizing her as a “rising star” by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. 

Professor Larsen's research interests include constitutional law and the institutional and informational dynamics of legal decision-making. Her work on fact-finding at the Supreme Court has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal. She also appeared with Stephen Colbert as a guest on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central) to discuss her scholarship on Supreme Court amicus briefs. She has recently joined a new casebook on Judicial Decision Making, and will be spending the next academic year on leave researching comparative judicial fact-finding at the University of Oxford.