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Lauren A. Fine is an Assistant clinical professor and the inaugural supervising attorney of Duke Law’s Criminal Defense Clinic. She joined the Duke Law faculty in July 2023 from serving as a Stoneleigh Visiting Fellow in partnership with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Lauren is a nationally recognized leader in youth justice reform and the co-founder and immediate past co-director of the Philadelphia-based Youth Sentencing & Reentry Project (YSRP), which works to keep children out of adult jails and prisons and walks alongside young people and “juvenile lifers” through their experiences with court and incarceration and as they return to the community. For this work, she was recognized as an Echoing Green Fellow, an American Express-Ashoka Emerging Innovator, a Claneil Emerging Leader Fellow, and an M. Night Shyamalan Leader. She also received the American Constitution Society David Carliner Public Interest Award, among other honors. Fineis the past Co-Chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section and currently serves on the Advisory Board for YSRP, as well as on the board of Rock to the Future, which provides free music programs for youth in Philadelphia. 

Previously, she served as a Zubrow Fellow in Children’s Law at Juvenile Law Center, where she worked to end juvenile life without parole sentences and to limit the collateral consequences of juvenile adjudications. Immediately after law school, Lauren clerked for Judge David R. Strawbridge in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Prior to attending law school, she served as a research assistant and project manager at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Fine earned her bachelor’s degree in history and in international studies from Yale University and her JD from Duke University School of Law.