Elizabeth P. Murtagh teaches the Criminal Defense Clinic at the Law School. She is the chief public defender for the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Murtagh earned her Bachelor of Social Work from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1979 and her J.D. from Washington and Lee University in 1989, where she was an associate editor of the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse Digest.
She is a member of the Virginia Criminal Justice Conference, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Evidence Based Decision Making Policy Team, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Drug Treatment Court Advisory Board and the Charlottesville-Albemarle Behavioral Health Treatment Docket Advisory Board. She is a 2012 Virginia Law Foundation Fellow and a Virginia Lawyers Weekly “Leaders in the Law” Class of 2015.
Murtagh is a former member of the Virginia State Bar Criminal Law Section Board of Governors; UVA Juvenile Competency Attainment Research and Development Center Advisory Board; Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center Advisory Board of the National Juvenile Defender Center; and the Juvenile Competency Workgroup of the Virginia Commission on Youth. She served as an investigator for two American Bar Association studies, “An Assessment of Access to Counsel and the Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in Virginia” and “An Assessment of Access to Counsel and the Quality of Representation in Delinquency Proceedings in West Virginia.” Murtagh is a frequent lecturer on representing children in court and criminal law for continuing legal education programs.