Professor of Law
The Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Ph.B. University of Detroit 1956
J.D. University of Detroit 1967
Professor Koenig is an award-winning teacher and prolific author whose criminal law textbook is used by many Cooley students. She is currently active in the Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section of the American Bar Association (IRR) as well as in the American Section of the International Association of Penal Law (AIDP.) She is a Fellow of the American and Michigan Bar Foundations.
Locally, she is a recipient of the YWCA’s Diana Award for outstanding service to the community, serves as a commissioner for the Cooley Innocence Project; and is a member of the Cooley Legal Author’s Society and the Cooley Sixty Plus Clinic Board. (In 1981 she was honored as Clinic volunteer director and teacher, a condition to obtaining coursework credit for Clinic students.)
Professor Koenig was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship to Finland where she was a guest professor at the University of Helsinki. She has lectured at law schools in Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and the Netherlands. Professor Koenig is co-editor, with Cooley graduate Kelly Askin, of a three-volume treatise series, Women and International Human Rights Law, encompassing articles by over 100 experts on women’s human rights from around the globe.
Prior to coming to Cooley, Professor Koenig was a partner and founder of Koenig, LeBost and Jobes, P.C., one of the first feminist law firms in Michigan. She later produced the inaugural Michigan Standard Criminal Jury Instructions and Commentaries working with a blue-ribbon committee of the Michigan State Bar. She was then placed in charge of the Detroit Research Office of the Michigan Court of Appeals prior to coming to Cooley.
Professor Koenig is current co-chair of the IRR Death Penalty Committee as well as an inaugural and current member of the IRR Task Force on Mental Illness and the Death Penalty which recently released standards to be applied in Death Penalty cases involving severely mentally ill defendants. The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association worked with the task force on the standards and have adopted them. The American Bar Association is expected to adopt them at its next annual meeting. She has begun work directing a new project on International Standards in death penalty cases for the Death Penalty Committee.
Professor Koenig is one of the principal authors of Death Without Justice: A Guide for Examining the Administration of the Death Penalty in the United States, adopting protocols for examining state procedures for fairness in death penalty cases. This Death Penalty Committee project was awarded the IRR Section inaugural award for excellence. Professor Koenig has set up, presented at and presided over many annual ABA programs.
Professor Koenig is a current member of the Executive Board of the American Section of the AIDP where she serves as Secretary. She worked for the AIDP assisting in the writing of numerous early drafts used in the drafting of the International Criminal Court Treaty (ICC Treaty). She was an NGO delegate from the AIDP to the Rome conference establishing the Treaty in 1998. She also participated as an expert on the treaty at a world conference in Siracusa, Sicily, in 2002. Prior to that she worked with the AIDP in the writing of the Statute for the International Criminal Courts for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
She was the only NGO delegate from the AIDP to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, as well as to the NGO conference in Huarou, China, where she presented a workshop on the ICC Treaty.
