Miriam H. Baer
Dean and President of California Western School of Law
Professor of Law
Faculty
Biography
After nearly a decade in legal practice and nineteen years of service and teaching in higher education, Miriam Baer joins California Western School of Law as its Dean and President. From 2022–2025, she served as the Vice Dean and a Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. During her tenure at Brooklyn, Baer taught and published extensively at the intersection of business law and criminal law and was a frequent commentator on white-collar crime and its enforcement.
An oft cited and well-known scholar, Dean Baer is the author of Myths and Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime (Cambridge University Press), her 2023 book examining the reasons why the public so often misunderstands the legal system tasked with prohibiting and enforcing the nation’s fraud and corruption laws. Baer’s book has been highlighted and discussed on numerous podcasts and is the subject of several academic book reviews. She is also a co-author of a leading casebook and study aid in white-collar crime, and she has contributed chapters to several of the leading scholarly compilations on criminal law, corporate theory, and corporate compliance.
In addition to her book contributions, Baer has published over thirty articles and essays in leading law review publications, including the Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Texas Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum.
Dean Baer is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Prior to entering academia, Dean Baer served as an assistant general counsel for compliance with Verizon and prosecuted crimes as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. She began her career clerking for the Honorable Jane R. Roth, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and spent two years practicing litigation for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore.
Dean Baer is delighted to have moved to the west coast and looks forward to exploring San Diego and its neighboring communities.
J.D., Harvard Law School, magna cum laude
A.B., Princeton University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa
View Dean Baer's SSRN Author Page.
Books
Myths & Misunderstandings in White-Collar Crime (Cambridge U. Press 2023)
White-Collar Crime, 6th Ed. (West Academic, forthcoming 2026), with Ellen Podgor, Katrice Copeland Bridges, Gregory Gilchrist, Jerold Israel, and Hon. Paul. D. Borman.
White-Collar Crime in a Nutshell (West Academic, 2022), with Ellen Podgor, Jerold Israel, & Gregory Gilchrist.
Chapters
Personhood, Procedure, and the Endurance of Corporate Compliance, in Research Handbook on Corporate Purpose and Personhood (E. Pollman and R. Thompson eds, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021)
Designing Corporate Leniency Programs, in Cambridge Handbook on Compliance (D. Sokol & B. Van Rooij, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Corporate Criminal Law Unbounded, in Oxford Handbook on Prosecutors and Prosecutions (R. Wright, K. Levine & R. Gold, eds., Oxford University Press, 2021)
When the Corporation Investigates Itself, in Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing (J. Arlen ed., Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018)
Contributions in Criminal Law Conversations (Robinson, Garvey & Ferzan, eds., Oxford University Press 2009)
Law Review Publications
Reframing Compliance for a Polarized World, 60 Wake Forest L. Rev. 223 (2025)
Taking Integrity Risks Seriously, 93 Fordham L. Rev. 1119 (2025) (symposium contribution)
Square Peg Frauds, 178 Northwestern L. Rev. 1 (2023) (symposium contribution)
Corporate Compliance’s Achilles Heel, 78 Bus. Lawyer 792 (2023) (symposium contribution)
Forecasting the How and Why of Corporate Crime’s Demise, 47 J Corp. L. 887 (2022) (symposium contribution)
The Information Shortfalls of Prosecuting Irresponsible Executives, 70 DePaul L. Rev. 191 (2021) (symposium contribution)
Law Enforcement’s Lochner, 105 Minn. L. Rev. 1667 (2021)
Three Conceptions of Corporate Crime (and One Avenue for Reform), 83 Law & Contemp. Probs. 1 (2020) (symposium contribution)
Compliance Elites, 88 Fordham L. Rev. 1599 (2019) (symposium contribution)
Sorting Out White-Collar Crime, 97 Tex. L. Rev. 225 (2018)
Propping up Corporate Crime with Corporate Character, 103 Iowa Law Review Online 88 (2018)
Reconceptualizing the Whistleblower’s Dilemma, 50 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 2215 (2017)
Pricing the Fourth Amendment, 58 Wm & Mary L. Rev. 1103 (2017)
Insider Trading’s Legality Problem, 127 Yale L.J. Forum 129 (2017)
Too Vast to Succeed, Book Review of Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by Brandon Garrett, 114 Mich. L. Rev. 1109 (2016)
Some Skepticism about Criminal Discovery Empiricism, 73 Wash & Lee L. Rev. Online 347 (2016)
Timing Brady, 115 Colum. L. Rev. 1 (2015)
Unsophisticated Sentencing, 61 Wayne L. Rev. 61 (2015) (symposium contribution)
Confronting the Two Faces of Corporate Fraud, 66 Fla. L. Rev. 87 (2014)
Secrecy, Intimacy, and Workable Rules: Justice Sotomayor Stakes Out the Middle Ground in United States v. Jones, 123 Yale L.J. Forum 393 (2014) (symposium contribution)
Choosing Punishment, 92 B.U. L. Rev. 577 (2012)
Some Thoughts on the Porous Boundary between Ordinary and Extraordinary Frauds, Book Review of Ensuring Corporate Misconduct by Tom Baker and Sean Griffith, 14 U. Pa. J. Bus. L. 927 (2012) (invited contribution)
Cooperation’s Cost, 88 Wash. U. L. Rev. 963 (2011)
Organizational Liability and the Tension Between Corporate and Criminal Law, 19 J. Law & Pol'y 1 (2010) (symposium contribution)
Governing Corporate Compliance, 50 B.C. L. Rev. 949 (2009)
Evaluating the Consequences of Calibrated Sentencing: A Response to Professor Kolber, 109 Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 211 (2009)
Linkage and the Deterrence of Corporate Fraud, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1295 (2008)
Insuring Corporate Crime, 83 Ind. L. J. 1035 (2008)
Corporate Governance and Corporate Policing: What Can We Learn from Hewlett-Packard’s Pretexting Scandal?, 77 U. Cin. L. Rev. 523 (2008) (symposium contribution)
Towards a More Balanced Treatment of Bidder and Target Shareholders, 1997 Colum. Bus. L. Rev. 319 (as Miriam P. Hechler)
The Role of the Corporate Attorney within the Takeover Context: Loyalties to Whom? 21 Del. J. Corp. L. 943 (1996) (as Miriam P. Hechler)
Shorter Publications
What White Collar Criminal Defendants Like Trump and Sam Bankman-Fried Have in Common, Slate, Oct. 16, 2023, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/trump-sam-bankman-fried-criminal-sentence.html
Gold Bars, Cash Won’t Convict Menendez But These Two Words Might, Bloomberg Law, Sept. 29, 2023, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/gold-bars-cash-wont-convict-menendez-but-these-two-words-might
Book review of John C. Coffee’s Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement, in Rutgers Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/corporate-crime-and-punishment-the-crisis-of-underenforcement/
Bruce Castor Botched the Cosby Case Even Worse than it Seems, (coauthored with Cynthia Godsoe) Slate, July 3, 2021, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/bruce-castor-bill-cosby-deal-bad.html
Book review of Brandon Garrett’s Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations, in Rutgers Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books, https://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/too-big-to-jail/
Blog posts: Business-law related posts for Columbia Blue Sky Blog, the Fin Reg Blog (Duke), Oxford Business Law blog, and NYU Program in Compliance and Enforcement.
Referee: Referee or reviewer for New Criminal Law Review, Springer (international book division), Law & Policy (Wiley), Regulation and Governance (Wiley), European Journal of Law and Economics (Springer), NYU Press, Stanford University Press, the Israeli Science Foundation, Walters Kluwer, the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Columbia Law Review.
Podcasts: Podcast interviews with Faculti, Business Scholarship Podcast, Oh My Fraud, Ipse Dixit, and Bite-Sized Business.
News coverage: Cited and quoted in Vox, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Opinion, The Atlantic, and other popular publications. Appearances on MSNBC, CBSN (CBS News’ digital network), NPR, and CNN.
Practice: Admitted to practice before the United States Courts of Appeal for the Second and Third Circuits, and the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.