Assistant Professor of Law Jessica West
Joining the Mitchell Hamline faculty as an assistant professor of law, Jessica West combines a passion for student success with her experience as a practitioner to help law students build the skills they need for the real world. She is one of two new faculty members for the 2025-26 academic year.
West started teaching in 2011 at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she designed a new course that blended pieces of doctrinal and skills-based coursework.
“I found it to be really important and compelling work,” she said of the experience, which has informed her teaching for more than a decade and several law schools later.
Teaching students to be practice-ready upon entering the legal profession is a hallmark of the education students receive at Mitchell Hamline, a shared value that drew West to the school.
Before entering academia, West spent 20 years as a practitioner fighting government and corporate overreach and litigating death penalty and complex civil and criminal cases. This included owning her own law firm, Smith & West, where she would often hire newer lawyers. In doing so, she became familiar with the knowledge and skills students needed to start building their careers.
She has since taught a number of courses—constitutional law, criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, persuasion, torts, and more—at law schools including Yale Law School and Vermont Law School, where she also served as director of their experiential advocacy program.
Most recently, she taught at the University of Washington Law School, where she also was assistant dean for academic success programs from 2019 to 2022. In her role, she built the school’s academic success program from the ground up, working with students from a range of different backgrounds and building resources for students and faculty alike. Whether in the classroom or outside, West’s focus is the same.
“The core for me is the commitment to helping students learn and focusing on that gap between where students are and where they need to be,” she said.
This student-centered approach is one she brings to Mitchell Hamline, where her primary teaching responsibilities will be in teaching doctrinal courses like evidence and in the clinical program.
West will be developing a clinic, First Amendment: Activism, that will engage in legal and policy issues related to nonviolent political action, beginning in the spring 2026 term. The clinic aligns with her scholarly focus on civil disobedience, activism, and the criminal prosecution of protesters.
Having grown up in a family of civil rights activists, West has had an enduring interest in the subject of protest from a young age.
“It’s incredibly empowering to be a lawyer,” she said. “I grew up with a strong sense of justice and injustice, and the importance of having your voice heard. As a lawyer, you can help people access systems and push back against unjust power.”
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