Professor Susan Tanner is an accomplished scholar and educator, currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Louisville, Brandeis School of Law. Prof. Tanner holds a PhD in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the recipient of the A.W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellowship in 2016 and the William S. Dietrich II Presidential Doctoral Fellowship in 2017. She also holds a JD from Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where she graduated cum laude as a Balfour Merit Scholar.

Prof. Tanner's scholarly interests lie at the intersection of law and language, with a particular focus on linguistic access to justice. Her doctoral research, "The Rhetorical Force of the Law: An Analysis of the Language, Genre and Structure of Legal Opinions," utilized large-corpora sociolinguistic and micro-level discourse analysis methods to examine how legal precedent is formed in judicial opinions.

In addition to her academic pursuits, Prof. Tanner has practical experience in a variety of legal areas, including complex litigation cases at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, education legislation for Students First, and taxpayer representation at a Low-Income Tax Clinic.

I spent my early life in Arizona and California. While in school, I began working for the International Modeling and Talent Association, which allowed me to work in New York and Los Angeles. I went to school for English, Philosophy and Rhetoric at Arizona State University and then went to law school in Bloomington, Indiana. After practicing for a couple of years at a large law firm, I went back to school to get my PhD in Rhetoric in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I now live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with my spouse and two adopted chihuahua mix dogs. 

As an A.W. Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow I used digital tools to analyze legal discourse.​ My research attempts to explain how a laws and concepts are shaped through legal discourse. To do this, I traced the inception of privacy law in the US from Warren and Brandeis’ “The Right to Privacy” through to current legal conceptions of privacy. Using Docuscope, a text analysis tool developed at CMU, I am able to perform macro-level linguistic analyses of a large corpus of legal texts which allowed me to analyze every state and federal appellate and supreme court privacy law opinion. I chose this line of jurisprudence in part because it gets its history from a non-legal source in the form of a law review article, which is eventually cited to help establish a legal, constitutional right to privacy. My findings add to an understanding of how the law is shaped by discourse and provide a tool for non-legal experts to understand the role of prior text in contemporary decisions.