Tom Lininger

Elmer Sahlstrom Senior Fellow

Professor Lininger grew up in Southern Oregon. He earned his undergraduate degree at Yale, and his law degree at Harvard. He has worked as a federal prosecutor, as counsel to a subcommittee in the U.S. Senate, and as a litigation attorney with the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom in San Francisco.

Lininger joined the UO faculty in 2003. He directs the UO's Public Interest/Public Service Program and serves as auctioneer at the annual fundraiser for the Oregon Law Students Public Interest Fund.

In 2004, Governor Ted Kulongoski appointed Lininger to chair the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission. The Commission plans Oregon's criminal justice policy and drafts sentencing guidelines used in Oregon's courts.

Lininger's research presently focuses on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, particularly the application of the Clause to prosecutions of domestic violence and sexual assault. Bonnie Campbell, the former director of the U.S. Violence Against Women Office, commended Lininger as a "national leader in the prosecution of domestic violence." He has authored legislation that addresses the unique challenges faced by complainants in prosecutions of domestic violence and rape. In 2006, Senator Joseph Biden's staff invited Lininger to participate in a work group advising the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on legislative strategies to meet the Supreme Court's new confrontation requirements for hearsay in criminal prosecutions. Lininger's scholarship on the Confrontation Clause has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and by the New York Times.

Lininger's recent scholarship has appeared in the Virginia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Cornell Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal, the Iowa Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, and the Stanford Law and Policy Review, among other journals. He is co-authoring a volume of "The New Wigmore" treatise on evidence law (Aspen Publishers), and is also co-authoring another book on the Supreme Court's new confrontation jurisprudence.

In 2006, Lininger received the Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2008, he received the Lokey Award for Faculty Excellence.