Lia Monahon

Lia Monahon is a Lecturer on Law and the Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. She supervises and trains CJI’s student attorneys in their direct representation of people who are poor and facing criminal charges throughout Suffolk County. Lia also oversees and collaborates closely with CJI’s social work staff. Since 2022, Lia has spearheaded a revival of CJI’s amicus practice, focusing on issues directly affecting the rights of CJI’s clients—past, present, and future—in Massachusetts. She joins the faculty of HLS’ Trial Advocacy Workshop annually.

Lia is an appointed member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Standing Advisory Committee on Eyewitness Identification.

For nearly 20 years, Lia has worked to challenge the racial and carceral injustices and daily inhumanities of the criminal court system. Before joining CJI in 2014, Lia was a public defender at the Roxbury Defenders Unit of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, where she tried cases as a Superior Court staff attorney. Her work as a line public defender was deeply influenced by her representation of individuals deemed “non-enemy combatants” incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which she undertook pro bono while at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. When Roper v. Simmons declared the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional, Lia was subsequently awarded an Equal Justice Works Fellowship to join the Children’s Law Center in Lynn and convene advocates in Massachusetts to challenge the imposition of death-in-prison sentences on youth in the Commonwealth.

Lia graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Women’s Studies and African & African American Studies, and from Northwestern University School of Law. She clerked for Hon. Kenneth M. Karas, district judge for the Southern District of New York.