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Anna E. Carpenter became the 14th Dean of the University of Oklahoma College of Law and 9th Director of the OU Law Center on July 15, 2024. She also holds the Fenelon Boesche Chair in Law.
Carpenter joined OU from the University of Utah, where she served as Special Advisor to the President. In this role, she was responsible for leading innovative university projects such as launching a first-in-the-nation program that leverages pay-for-success financing to scale social interventions developed by university researchers, as well as developing a new program to increase college affordability and community service by blending service requirements with substantial scholarships and wages for undergraduate students.
At the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, she was Professor of Law and, while serving as Director of Clinical Programs, she founded and directed Justice Lab, a clinical course in which students work with community organizations to solve legal and policy problems and advocate for systemic change. For her leadership in legal services and legal education innovation, she received the inaugural Alli Gerkman Legal Visionary Award from the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.
Carpenter’s scholarship includes empirical and theoretical work on state civil courts and judges, access to justice, the relationship between law, civil courts, structural inequality, legal regulatory innovation, and legal paraprofessionals. She has also written on legal education and clinical pedagogy, and her papers have been selected for the Junior Scholars Public Law Workshop and the New Voices in Civil Justice Workshop. Her scholarship has been recognized with numerous national honors, including the Stephen Ellmann Memorial Clinical Scholarship Award, and she was named a Bellow Scholar by the Association of American Law Schools’ Committee on Lawyering in the Public Interest.
Prior to joining the University of Utah faculty in 2019, Carpenter’s academic appointments included Associate Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law and Clinical Teaching Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. She was also a Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow.
Before her academic career, she worked as a legal services lawyer representing low-income people in civil and immigration matters and as a federal policy analyst focused on domestic violence and poverty. She has a J.D. and LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from Willamette University.
B.A., Sociology, Willamette University
J.D., Law, Georgetown University Law Center
LL.M., Advocacy, Georgetown University Law Center