Bio

Professor DeSanctis has two decades of experience teaching legal research and writing, appellate advocacy, scholarly writing, and law and literature. She has also taught undergraduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and American literature. From 2004-2020, she was the Director of the Legal Research & Writing Program at The George Washington University Law School. During the last three years of her tenure at GW law, she revamped the 1L curriculum to focus on client-centered problem solving and launched the six-credit Fundamentals of Lawyering Program.

After graduating from NYU School of Law, Professor DeSanctis clerked in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey and thereafter spent six years practicing law at large law firms in New York and Washington, DC, where she focused on trial and appellate litigation at both the state and federal level, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. She holds an A.B. with distinction in English from Duke University with a minor in linguistics, and a Masters in English language and literature with a minor in rhetoric and composition from the University of Maryland.