Professor Coker’s scholarship focuses on criminal law, gender, and race inequality. She is a nationally recognized expert in intimate partner violence (IPV) law and policy. Her research and teaching concern restorative justice and other non-carceral responses to IPV and sexual harm; the connection between economic vulnerability and IPV; the political economy of the carceral state; and the intersections of gender and race subordination in criminal law doctrine, policy, and application. She teaches courses in criminal law doctrine and policy; evidence; social justice lawyering; mass incarceration: causes, consequences, and remedies; gender violence, social justice, and law; and restorative justice.

Her early empirical study of domestic violence cases in Navajo Peacemaking Courts has influenced scholarship in the fields of restorative justice and domestic violence. She frequently serves as an advisor to IPV restorative justice projects including most recently the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery. She served as the 2022-2023 International Fellow for the Restorative Research, Innovation, and Education Lab at Dalhousie University.

Professor Coker has taught courses that are collaborations between students and community organizations including most recently Beyond the Bars, a Miami-Dade County organization whose membership are formerly incarcerated persons and their families; the AJRC Community Safety Toolkit Project, in collaboration with Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians stakeholders; and as Co-PI with the Miami-Dade Safety Project of the University of Miami Human Rights Clinic. Professor Coker received her JD from Stanford Law School and her MSW from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Publications