Law

Professor of Law

"Learning the law is not really about learning legal rules and standards. It is primarily about learning to make connections - distinctions, analogies, comparisons, and contrasts - between and among cases and doctrines. The biggest thrill I get as a teacher is seeing that light bulb go on in a student's head when he or she makes one of these connections. And sometimes, it is something that even I did not see before."

Profile

Mike Mannheimer received his J.D. in 1994 from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar all three years and served as Writing & Research Editor of the Columbia Law Review. After a brief stint as a staff attorney with the Criminal Appeals Bureau of the Legal Aid Society in New York City, he clerked for the Hon. Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and then for the Hon. Robert E. Cowen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, where he practiced general commercial litigation and arbitration encompassing such diverse areas as antitrust, breach of contract, business torts, employment discrimination, ERISA, false advertising, product liability, and civil RICO.

For five years before joining the Chase faculty in 2004, Professor Mannheimer served as Appellate Counsel and then Senior Appellate Counsel at the Center for Appellate Litigation in New York City, where he represented indigent criminal defendants on appeal from their convictions and in related collateral proceedings. He has briefed and/or argued over forty appeals in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, the New York Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has represented clients at every level of the state and federal judiciaries, from handling sentencing proceedings, motions, and hearings in the New York trial courts to filing cert. petitions in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Mannheimer is Co-Chair of the Kentucky Death Penalty Assessment Team for the American Bar Association. He has published articles on the death penalty, coerced confessions, and the Establishment, Free Speech, Self-Incrimination, and Confrontation Clauses. He is currently conducting research on the application of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause to federal sentencing. His most recent work, on the use of the premeditation-deliberation formula to distinguish first- and second-degree murder, was the winner of the 2010 AALS Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholar Paper Award.

Public Service

Co-Chair, Kentucky Death Penalty Assessment Team, American Bar Association

Co-counsel on petition for writ of certiorari in Leon v. New York, 128 S.Ct. 2976 (2008) (pro bono).

Latest Publications

Self-Government, the Federal Death Penalty, and the Unusual Case of Michael Jacques, 36 Vt. L. Rev. 131 (2011) (invited submission)
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Cruel and Unusual Federal Punishments, SSRN (2011) (in progress)
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Proportionality and Federalism: A Response to Professor Stinneford, 97 Va. L. Rev. In Brief 51 (2011)
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Not the Crime But the Cover-up: A Deterrence Based Rationale for the Premeditation-Deliberation Formula, 86 Ind. L.J. 879 (2011) (winner of the 2010 AALS Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholar Paper Award)
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The Impact of Information Overload on the Capital Jury's Ability to Assess Aggravating and Mitigating Factors, 17 Wm. & Mary Bill Rts. J. 1089 (2009) (co-authored with Katie Morgan)
Hein   LexisNexis   Westlaw 

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