Katya Cronin

Katya Cronin is an Associate Professor in the Fundamentals of Lawyering program. Her legal pedagogy scholarship focuses on topics related to professional identity formation, lawyer and law student wellbeing, leadership, values, and ethics. Prof. Cronin’s work on these topics has been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in the field, including the Journal of Legal Education and the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.

Prof. Cronin is also an affiliated faculty member of the Global Food Institute at GW and core faculty with the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. In these roles, she works collaboratively with experts from other fields on topics related to environmental toxins in food, food additives and ultra-processed foods, food safety, nutrition security, and regenerative agriculture. Prof. Cronin’s scholarship resides at the intersection of food law, health law, agricultural law, and environmental law and has appeared in law reviews, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journals, and popular media.

Prior to entering academia, Prof. Cronin spent over a decade in private practice. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, Professor Cronin began her legal career as a Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation associate at Latham & Watkins. There, she worked on over a dozen U.S. Supreme Court cases, including the seminal case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

Subsequently, Professor Cronin joined the law firm of Tucker Ellis. As counsel there, she represented individual clients, corporations, educational institutions, and state governments at both the trial and appellate level. Her practice focused on constitutional law, complex commercial litigation, medical and pharmaceutical liability, environmental law, and government contracts.

Throughout her legal career, Professor Cronin also maintained an active pro bono docket. As one of the inaugural members of the Michigan Innocence Clinic, she was part of a litigation team that overturned the convictions of several wrongfully convicted defendants. In private practice, Professor Cronin has successfully litigated on behalf of death-row inmates before trial and appellate courts. She has also represented individual and institutional clients pro bono before the U.S. Supreme Court. As part of her pro bono work, Professor Cronin received the Center for Justice and Accountability’s Partner in Justice award for her successful representation of a Somali law professor tortured for his human rights advocacy.

A native Bulgarian, Professor Cronin enjoys traveling internationally, exploring foreign cuisines, and learning new languages.

Professor Cronin is an affiliated faculty member of the Global Food Institute at GW.