Steven J. Mulroy is the District Attorney for Shelby County, Tennessee. He was elected DA in August 2022. DA Mulroy oversees a total staff of 238, including more than 110 prosecutors.
He attended Cornell University, graduating with Distinction in All Subjects, then attended William & Mary Law School, where he graduated Order of the Coif.
In the 1990s he served in the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., first as a civil rights litigator and later as a federal prosecutor. In 2000, he became a law professor at the University of Memphis, where for 22 years he taught and published in the areas of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Civil Rights. During that time he also engaged in pro bono criminal and civil rights litigation in numerous cases at the trial and appellate level in state and federal court. At the time of his election as DA, he was the Bredesen Professor of Law. Shortly after being sworn in as DA, he became an Emeritus Professor.
Mulroy was elected in 2006 to the Shelby County Commission, where he served for 8 years. While on the County Commission, Mulroy drafted Shelby County's first ethics, living wage, animal welfare, and “cash for tires” ordinances, as well as the first-ever legislation at any level in Tennessee barring LGBT discrimination. He successfully pushed for substantial increases in county funding for homelessness and pre-K education, and an end to the illegal practice of “48-hour holds” of suspects without probable cause. During the body's 2011 redistricting, he led the successful effort to switch from large 3-Commissioner multimember districts to neighborhood-based single-member districts, arguing, among other things, that the latter led to more competitive elections.
Mulroy is the author of Rethinking US election law: Unskewing the System, as well as dozens of scholarly articles on criminal law and civil rights. He’s published articles in such national publications as SLATE, NEWSWEEK, THE NEW REPUBLIC, SALON, THE HILL, and the HUFFINGTON POST. He’s been a legal commentator for MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN, and has testified before Congress and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Both his blood type and his chirpy personal motto is B positive.