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To poet John Donne, no man is an island. To Eric Hintz, one of Mizzou Law’s newest professors, no area of the law is, either.
With an undergraduate degree in economics and a graduate degree in global security studies, Hintz has always enjoyed approaching academic questions from a trans-substantive perspective.
“I really liked the interdisciplinary component of [the law], and the sort of aspect that you can be a generalist, and learn all sorts of different things,” Hintz said. “One of the meta points that I enjoyed about economics and global security studies was that you’re thinking about all sorts of different issues through a particular lens, but you’re able to engage with a range of different phenomena. The law does a similar thing.”
While Hintz enjoys the way that the law cuts across disciplines, as a law student, one particular focus area did stand out.
“Criminal law was my first class in law school,” he said. “I got to that class, and it was like, ‘Wow, this is really exciting.’ And I just kind of fell in love with it.”
Hintz went on to take as many criminal law and criminal procedure classes as possible and to seek out further criminal justice experience, while also maintaining a connection to his generalist roots.
Immediately after graduating with his law degree, Hintz served as a law clerk and then as a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice—an interdisciplinary research center focused on reducing error in the criminal justice system.
Through his fellowship, Hintz knew he had found his calling in academia. He loved teaching students and became fascinated with researching ways to improve criminal procedure by drawing on ideas from across legal disciplines. Before pursuing a full-time academic career, however, Hintz first wanted to gain experience in practice.
“[The fellowship] was a really rewarding experience,” he said. “That’s where I really started publishing and started thinking about criminal law issues from an academic standpoint. Then after that, I really wanted to gain practice experience…I thought that it would be valuable to be able to better understand the issues I would be speaking to from an academic perspective.”
After working as a practicing attorney across multiple practice areas at a few law firms, Hintz decided to make the final leap back into teaching.
“Every chance I’ve had to be involved in teaching or mentoring students has been just like my favorite thing,” he said. “It’s just the biggest impact, and it’s just so rewarding to be able to be even a small part of their growth process.”
This semester, Hintz is teaching criminal procedure to upper-level students and will teach criminal law—a 1L class—in the spring. From 1Ls to upper-levels, Hintz said he’s excited to see where his students will go in the future with the knowledge and skills they acquire at Mizzou Law.