Department of Law, University of Michigan
Research: the role of the prosecutor in criminal justice outcomes
Residency: spring 2011

Prescott earned his JD, magna cum laude, in 2002 from Harvard Law School, where he was the treasurer (vol. 115) of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge Merrick B. Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, he earned a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. Prescott’s research interests include criminal law, sentencing law and reform, employment law, and torts. Much of his work is empirical in focus. Current projects include an empirical evaluation of the effects of prosecutor race and sex on charging and sentencing outcomes using a unique data set from New Orleans; a study of the socioeconomic consequences of criminal record expungement using microlevel data from Michigan; and a paper that develops a theoretical model to explain the use of high-low agreements in civil litigation and then tests the model’s predictions using detailed insurance data.