Hannah Shaffer

Hannah Shaffer joined Harvard Law School as an assistant professor in 2023. Her research uses empirical methods to study how discretion moves through the criminal legal system — from arrest to charging to sentencing to rearrest. Shaffer’s recent research uses administrative court records to examine racial disparities in criminal charging and sentencing, specifically how prosecutors interpret and respond to racial disparities inherited from police and earlier decision-makers in the criminal process. To understand more holistically what drives empirical patterns in the court records, she surveys prosecutors and links their reported beliefs to their real-world decisions. 

Shaffer has several scholarly works that were recently published or accepted, including “Prosecutors, Race, and the Criminal Pipeline,” in the University of Chicago Law Review; “Brokers of Bias: Do Prosecutors Compound or Attenuate Racial Disparities Inherited at Arrest?,” in the Review of Economics and Statistics; and “Prediction Errors, Incarceration, and Violent Crime,” in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She also has a recent working paper that evaluates the impacts of police body-worn cameras on arrest and incarceration outcomes.

Shaffer joined HLS from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a Bigelow Fellow. She received a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, where she was a Stone Ph.D. Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration, and a J.D. from HLS, where she was a John M. Olin Fellow at the Center for Law, Economics, and Business. From 2019 to 2021, she served as a resident tutor at Lowell House, one of the undergraduate residences at Harvard University. She received her B.A., graduating summa cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis.