Two generations of law students at the University of Kansas knew Suzanne Valdez as the professor who taught them Professional Responsibility and Prosecutorial Ethics. Kansas lawyers know her as a special prosecutor, a judge pro tem, and the district attorney who led Douglas County from 2021 to 2025. The Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, one of four federally recognized tribes in the state, knows her as its Attorney General. Nearly three decades of public service, legal education, and courtroom practice have produced all of those descriptions, and a single conviction sits beneath them: the legal system works best when it accounts for the people inside it.

Her academic career began in 1999, when she joined the University of Kansas School of Law, and lasted through 2021, more than twenty years as a Clinical Professor of Law. Her teaching load included State Court Practice along with the ethics courses, and she ran workshops in deposition skills and expert witness examination. Administratively she directed the Criminal Prosecution Field Placement Program, the Externship Clinic, and the LL.M. program in Elder Law, while students at the Douglas County Legal Aid Society practiced under her supervision. Recognition followed: the Connell Teaching Professorship in 2019, two Immel Awards for Teaching Excellence, and the presidency of the KU University Senate in 2019 and 2020.

The scholarship matched the syllabus. Suzanne Valdez and Professor R. Michael Cassidy co-authored the third edition of Prosecutorial Ethics, published by West Publishing in the American Casebook Series. University of California Press published Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade in 2024 with a chapter of hers in it. Her law review and bar journal writing includes a policy paper on low-level, non-violent female drug offenders in Kansas, and she compiled Practice in Kansas, a course text that covers civil procedure, landlord-tenant law, consumer protection, and family law. Roughly 100 professional presentations sit alongside the publications, and a new book drawn from her years in prosecution is in progress.

One faculty role pointed toward everything that came later. From 2015 until her departure in 2021, Valdez was the law school's ombudsperson, mediating conflict among faculty, students, and staff. The assignment convinced her that alternatives to litigation deserve a larger place in the justice system, particularly in how that system responds to non-violent crime.

Practice never stopped during the academic years. She had started at Kansas Legal Services in 1996, representing low-income clients in Kansas City, Kansas, across civil and criminal matters and in federal disability and housing litigation. She served twice as a special prosecutor in the Wyandotte County District Attorney's Office, from 2005 to 2008 and from 2017 to 2020, handling high-level felony conflict of interest cases. In 2008 she took the bench as a pro tem district judge in Douglas County, presiding over the juvenile offender, post-decree family law, and criminal first appearance dockets. Her Of Counsel position at Smith Legal, LLC, ran from 2009 through 2021 and involved civil matters in Kansas state court for private and pro bono clients.

She gave the state a great deal of unpaid time as well. Suzanne Valdez chaired the Kansas Crime Victims Compensation Board for eight years, overseeing a compensation fund that averaged roughly $3 million annually for survivors of violent crime. Two Kansas Attorneys General nominated her to the chairmanship, and three times the Kansas Senate confirmed her unanimously. She chaired the Kansas Continuing Legal Education Commission, sat on the Kansas Judicial Council's Family Law Advisory Committee and the Kansas Supreme Court's Access to Justice Committee, and served on American Bar Association law school accreditation teams.

Then came the elected office. As District Attorney for Douglas County, Kansas, from 2021 to 2025, she was the chief law enforcement officer for roughly 125,000 residents, with an office of about 50 employees and a budget of approximately $2 million. She directed those limited resources toward violent crime, including sexual assault of children and adults, intimate partner violence, and gun offenses. With fentanyl deaths climbing across Kansas, she prosecuted those who distributed it, a priority shaped by loss. A fentanyl poisoning death in 2019 had taken her brother, Christopher Valdez, a U.S. Army veteran. She helped secure $1 million in funding to establish a Veterans Treatment Court in Douglas County, working alongside retired Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss, and she supported alternatives to incarceration, community outreach and crime prevention, and services for victims of crime.

Restorative justice became her full-time work next. From May 2025 to May 2026 she was a restorative justice mediator, facilitator, and trainer at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Kansas City, Missouri. The role had her mediating interpersonal conflict, facilitating community accountability boards and victim offender dialogues, and co-leading the organization's conflict resolution trainings. She served as its People and Culture Administrator too, handling internal staff matters through the same restorative lens. At the heart of the discipline is one observation, that harmed people harm people, and a method built on dignity, acknowledgment, and accountability as the route to restoring everyone involved in a conflict. Its roots lie in the practices of indigenous tribes before colonization, which links it directly to the Indian law work she does today.

As Attorney General, Suzanne Valdez represents the Kickapoo Tribe as a sovereign nation. The Tribe's economic development plan takes much of her current attention, and she keeps sovereignty and self-determination at the forefront of every agreement. She has also established Suzanne Valdez, LLC, Restorative Justice Law and Mediation, a Kansas practice she is building as she continues her commitment to Indian law.

Her community record is long. Her board service includes Douglas County CASA and the Douglas County Child Advocacy Center, which serves children who have been abused or neglected. She has volunteered with LINK, the Lawrence interdenominational nutrition kitchen, led a unit at Hidden Valley Girl Scout Camp, worked with Mentoring4Success in support of women returning to their communities after incarceration, and served as an admissions field representative for the United States Military Academy at West Point. Volunteering during her year in Kansas City included support for transgender women in the Missouri Department of Corrections and on probation and parole. March 2024 brought a Certificate of Appreciation in Recognition of Women's History Month from the Lawrence Army Recruiting Station, given after she directed her office to clear outstanding tickets and petty misdemeanors for Army recruits so they could report to basic training.

She earned her J.D. at the University of Kansas School of Law in 1996, serving on the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy and receiving the Walter Hiersteiner Outstanding Service Award. Her B.S. in business administration, awarded with Highest Distinction, is from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Kansas and Missouri both license her, and she is admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States.

She lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where family is the center of her life, from her parents to her grown children and the wider circle she has helped raise. Marathons are in the past, but she still runs. She reads historical fiction, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and she follows Jayhawk sports closely.