Recently taught courses
Winter Term 2025 (current)
Fall Term 2024
Winter Term 2024
William Ortman
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Biography
William Ortman writes about the legal and institutional design of criminal justice. His current scholarship focuses on plea bargaining, the practice that accounts for the vast majority of criminal convictions in American courts. Before joining Wayne Law, Ortman taught legal research and writing as a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School. From 2007 to 2013, he was a criminal defense lawyer and commercial litigator in Des Moines, Iowa. Before that, he clerked for Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Ortman earned his law degree with highest honors from the University of Chicago Law School, and a bachelor of arts with highest honors from Swarthmore College.
Since joining the Wayne Law faculty in 2016, Ortman has taught criminal law, evidence, criminal procedure, administrative law and a seminar on advanced topics in criminal law and procedure. He has been voted Professor of the Year by Wayne Law’s upper-level students four times, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2024, and by its first-year student once, in 2021.
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Degrees and Certifications
J.D., University of Chicago Law School
B.A., Swarthmore College -
Recent Scholarship
Articles and Essays
Confession and Confrontation, 113 Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025)
The Prosecution Bar, 101 Wash. U. L. Rev. 123 (2023)
The Informed Jury, 75 Vand. L. Rev. 823 (2022) (with Daniel Epps)
Confrontation in the Age of Plea Bargaining, 121 Colum. L. Rev. 451 (2021)
The Defender General, 168 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1469 (2020) (with Daniel Epps)
When Plea Bargaining Became Normal, 100 B.U. L. Rev. 1435 (2020) (selected for Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum)
Second-Best Criminal Justice, 96 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1061 (2019)
The Lottery Docket, 116 Mich. L. Rev. 705 (2018) (with Daniel Epps)
Probable Cause Revisited, 68 Stan. L. Rev. 511 (2016)
Rulemaking's Missing Tier, 68 Ala. L. Rev. 225 (2016)
Chevron for Juries, 36 Cardozo L. Rev. 1287 (2015)
Shorter Pieces
Crawford and Criminal Justice, U. Mich. J.L. Reform __ (forthcoming) (symposium)
Plea Bargaining Abolitionism: A History, 20 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. __ (forthcoming) (symposium)
Plea Bargaining and Guilty Plea, in Elgar Encyclopedia of Crime and Criminal Justice (2023)
The Yates Memo Versus Administrative Law, 165 U. Pa. L. Rev. Online 191 (2017)
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Social Science Research Network