Michael J. Z. Mannheimer

Michael J.Z. Mannheimer, Regents Professor of Law at Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University, has a national reputation among legal scholars and jurists for his research explaining and demonstrating contemporary applications of original understandings of the United States Constitution, principally involving the Fourth Amendment, which forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures," and the Eighth Amendment, which forbids "cruel and unusual punishments." He was elected in 2022 to the American Law Institute, the leading organization in the United States producing scholarly works to help judges, lawyers and legislators in their thinking on clarifying, modernizing, and improving the law.

His law review articles have been published in the Columbia Law Review, Texas Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Indiana Law Journal, and Iowa Law Review, among others, and his book, The Fourth Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Policing, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2023. It explores how the Fourth Amendment could be applied in a reimagined approach to local policing. His work has been cited by United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, federal district courts in Massachusetts, Vermont and West Virginia, and the high courts of Connecticut, Montana and Vermont. His work on the use of the premeditation-deliberation formula to distinguish first- and second-degree murder was the winner of the Association of American Law Schools 2010 Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholar Paper Award.

Following graduation from Columbia Law School in 1994 he clerked for Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and for Judge 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.

Before joining the Chase faculty in 2004, Professor Mannheimer served for five years as appellate counsel and later 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 written briefs for or argued more than 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 at New York City. 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 certiorari petitions for reviews by the Supreme Court of the United States.

At Chase, he is also coordinator of the Kentucky Innocence Project, in which students investigate credible claims of wrongful convictions.