Professor Baradaran's teaching and scholarship focus on criminal law, criminal procedure, and international law. Her current scholarship examines prediction, the presumption of innocence, search and seizure, international law and terrorism, and race and violent crime.  Her work has been featured in the New York Times, on National Public Radio and other media outlets.  Her most recent articles are Funding Terror, University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming), Predicting Violence, Texas Law Review, Race, Prediction & Discretion, George Washington Law Review, and Does International Law Matter?, Minnesota Law Review.  She serves on the AALS Criminal Justice Section Executive Committee and as the Chair of the ABA Pretrial Justice Taskforce and Co-chair of the Committee on Crime Prevention, Pretrial Release & Police Practices.

Before joining the law faculty at BYU, Professor Baradaran served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar researching pretrial detention in Malawi and lecturing in criminal law at the University of Malawi. While in Malawi she worked as a justice advisor to the British Department for International Development, advised a coalition of international nongovernmental organizations including UNAIDS and UNDP, and represented criminal defendants in felony cases.

Professor Baradaran has worked as a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in New York, receiving national press for role in prison reform litigation.  After graduating first in her class at Brigham Young University Law School and serving as editor-in-chief of the BYU Law Review, Professor Baradaran clerked for Judge Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.