When S. David Mitchell leaves for work in the morning, he isn’t sure which hat to wear. Sometimes he is a law professor, and sometimes he is a sociologist. On most days he wears both hats at once—an interdisciplinary approach to research that seems to bode well. As an associate professor in MU’s School of Law, Mitchell’s teaching and research feed off each other, focusing on the intersection of society and the law. While his teaching covers topics ranging from torts and criminal justice administration—from “bail to jail”—the courses he gets most excited about involve his main area of research, including “Law and Society” and “Collateral Consequences of Sentencing.”

From professors and lawyers to the judges themselves, legal scholarship is continually cited and challenged. As for whom he is addressing when publishing his findings, Mitchell explains that “I write for a much larger audience,” including the general public as well as felons and ex-felons. “You have got to speak to both the scholar and the lay person,” he contends. “We do an injustice to our work when it’s not accessible to those individuals.”