About

Carissa Byrne Hessick joined the faculty of UNC School of Law in 2016, where she holds the position of Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland 'Buck' Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law. She is also the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project. Her teaching and research interests include criminal law, the structure of the criminal justice system, criminal sentencing, and child pornography crimes. Hessick has authored multiple law review articles, essays, and op-eds on topics such as plea bargaining, the powers and selection of prosecutors, Sixth Amendment sentencing rights, and criminal statutes. Her work has been published in prominent law reviews and media outlets. She founded the Prosecutors and Politics Project in 2018 and currently serves as the Reporter for the ABA Criminal Justice Section's Sentencing Standards Task Force. Hessick attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the Potter Stewart Prize for the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals. She clerked for Judge Barbara S. Jones on the Southern District of New York and Judge A. Raymond Randolph on the D.C. Circuit. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City. Hessick has also taught at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law, and spent two years as a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Business
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Facts, Policy, and Discretion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• THE RIGHT TO A JURY AND THE RISE OF GUILTY PLEAS ACROSS COMMON LAW COUNTRIES

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Prosecutors and Politics Project: Media Coverage of Prosecutors and Their Elections: Results of a Pilot Study <br>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prosecutors and Politics Project: National Study of Campaign Contributions in Prosecutor Elections

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Nuances of Prosecutorial Nonenforcement

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Donating to the District Attorney

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2024-02-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  The United States is the only country that elects its local prosecutors. In theory, these local elections could facilitate local control of criminal justice policy. But the academic literature assumes that, in practice, prosecutor elections fail to live up to that promise. This Article complicates that conventional wisdom with a new, national study of campaign contributions in prosecutor elections. The study offers a more complete empirical account of prosecutor accountability by analyzing contributions to local candidates as well as their election results. It details the amount of money in local prosecutor elections, including from interest groups, and the relationship between candidate fundraising and success. The stark differences across the country underscore that the more than two thousand local prosecutors are not a monolith; some offices are best understood as political, with contested elections and significant amounts of campaigning, while most appear more bureaucratic, with neither. Recognizing this distinction suggests that accountability efforts require a multifaceted approach. If some prosecutors are more akin to bureaucrats, reformers should not limit themselves to recruiting electoral challengers; they should also consider layering bureaucratic accountability on top of political accountability. Further, at least for now, money in prosecutor politics has served as a moderating, rather than punitive, force.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Legality, Legal Standards, and the Legacy of Marvin Frankel

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Judges and Mass Incarceration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Real Problem with Plea Bargaining

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This Response critiques Jeffrey Bellin’s argument that plea‑bargaining reform should focus solely on problems uniquely caused by plea bargaining and instead contends that the practice has fundamentally reshaped American criminal justice in ways that extend far beyond Bellin’s narrow framework. The Response argues that plea bargaining exacerbates systemic issues—including harsh sentencing, coercive leverage, and inaccurate convictions—by insulating legislative excess, weakening trial incentives, and pressuring even innocent defendants to plead guilty. It further maintains that Bellin understates how plea bargaining distorts legislative behavior, affects statutory design, and suppresses political pressure for reform. Most importantly, the Response identifies plea bargaining’s central harm as its displacement of constitutionally grounded adjudicative processes with an unregulated system of negotiation dominated by prosecutorial power, where defendants routinely waive discovery, trial rights, and appellate review in pursuit of leniency. Because prosecutors can demand that defendants bargain away any procedural protections, the piece concludes that Bellin’s uncertainty‑reducing reforms are unlikely to succeed without structural limits on prosecutorial leverage. True reform, it is argued, requires addressing how plea bargaining has transformed—and degraded—the rule‑of‑law foundations of the criminal justice system, not merely improving informational symmetry within negotiations.

  Publisher

• Legality, Legal Standards, and the Legacy of Marvin Frankel

  Federal Sentencing Reporter · 2023-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In his widely influential book, Criminal Sentences: Law without Order, Marvin Frankel offered a blistering critique of judge-led sentencing, arguing that judicial sentencing discretion runs afoul of the famed principle of legality. In particular, Frankel claimed that sentencing is unique in its failure to adhere to the rule of law and that sentencing in the mid-twentieth century did not contain enough law. This essay argues that Frankel overstated his case. Although judges likely operated with insufficient constraints on their discretion, Frankel was wrong to argue that precise rules and the elimination of discretion are the hallmarks of justice and the rule of law, or that they are the norm in the modern criminal justice system. He was especially wrong to suggest that those who wrote the U.S. Constitution would have shared that view. Frankel’s errors led him to embrace legislative rulemaking as the appropriate limit on judicial discretion, rather than appellate court development of flexible legal standards. Frankel’s dismissal of appellate review as the appropriate path to sentencing reform has had long-lasting negative consequences on American sentencing. Unlike rigid, mandatory guidelines¬—which Frankel favored—appellate review would have struck a difference balance between uniformity and individualization, would have allowed for a consensus to build around sentencing factors, and would not have empowered prosecutors to the same extent that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines did.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• F. Andrew Hessick

  17 shared

• Douglas A. Berman

  5 shared

• Gabriel J. Chin

  3 shared

• Nathan Pinnell

  2 shared

• Sarah A. Treul

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• Leslie P. Francis

  University of Utah

  2 shared

• Joseph E. Kennedy

  2 shared

• Ronald F. Wright

  Wake Forest University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Law

  University of California, Berkeley

  2006

• Other, Law

  University of California, Berkeley

  2003

• B.A., Philosophy

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2000

Awards & honors

• Potter Stewart Prize for the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appe…