Victor D. Quintanilla

Victor D. Quintanilla is the Co-Director of the Law School’s Center for Law, Society & Culture, an Indiana University Bicentennial Professor, Professor of Law, and an Adjunct Professor at the Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Quintanilla’s research investigates civil justice design, access to justice, and legal education by drawing on theory and methods within the field of psychological science, including experiments conducted with judges, lawyers, law students, and members of the public.  He is currently serving as the principal investigator of a research line on Mindsets in Legal Education (MILE), seeking to create, implement, and evaluate social psychological interventions to promote productive mindsets, diversity, and enhance the student experience and performance throughout the pipeline of legal education, which has received funding from the AccessLex Institute.  He is also serving as the principal investigator on a second research line that harnesses psychological methods to examine how unrepresented persons are socially constructed and stereotyped into pro se parties and designs and evaluates social psychological interventions to improve their experiences and outcomes.

Quintanilla is developing an interdisciplinary approach to improve and innovate the delivery of legal services known as human-centered civil justice design, which harnesses psychological and behavioral science, and centers on an empirical and ethical understanding of the persons and parties within the civil justice system so as to better serve the needs of our society.  He served as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2015-2016).  He has presented his research at a variety of academic conferences, including the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Conference for Empirical Legal Studies, and the Law and Society Association.

Before joining the Law School, Quintanilla served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division; an associate of Sidley Austin LLP; a staff law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a law clerk to the Honorable Peter J. Messitte of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

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