Ask what links a legal aid caseload, a law school lectern, a prosecutor's table, and a mediation circle, and the answer in Suzanne Valdez's case is a belief she has carried for nearly thirty years: the legal system works best when it accounts for the people inside it. A Kansas attorney whose working life has spanned public service, legal education, and courtroom practice, she has been a legal aid attorney, a law professor, a special prosecutor, a judge pro tem, an elected district attorney, and a restorative justice mediator. Today she is Attorney General for the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, one of four federally recognized tribes in the state. In that role she represents the Tribe as a sovereign nation. The Tribe's economic development plan occupies much of her attention, and sovereignty and self-determination remain at the forefront of every agreement. Beside it she has built Suzanne Valdez, LLC, Restorative Justice Law and Mediation, a Kansas practice she grows as her commitment to Indian law deepens. The restorative thread is longer than it looks. As ombudsperson for the University of Kansas School of Law from 2015 until she left the faculty in 2021, Suzanne Valdez mediated conflict among faculty, students, and staff. That work taught her that alternatives to litigation deserve a larger place in the justice system, especially in the way it handles non-violent crime. She took that lesson into practice from May 2025 to May 2026 at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Kansas City, Missouri, as a restorative justice mediator, facilitator, and trainer. The work involved mediating interpersonal conflict, facilitating community accountability boards and victim offender dialogues, and co-leading the organization's conflict resolution trainings. She was also its People and Culture Administrator, bringing the same restorative lens to matters among staff. Restorative justice starts from a blunt observation, that harmed people harm people, and holds that dignity, acknowledgment, and accountability restore everyone involved in a conflict. The practice descends from what indigenous tribes did before colonization, a lineage that runs straight into the Indian law work she handles today. Between the classroom and the mediation table came four years as Douglas County's elected chief law enforcement officer. Valdez served as District Attorney from 2021 to 2025 for a county of roughly 125,000 residents, leading about 50 employees on a budget of approximately $2 million. She aimed those limited resources at violent crime, including sexual assault of children and adults, intimate partner violence, and gun offenses, and as fentanyl deaths climbed across Kansas she prosecuted those distributing it. In 2019, fentanyl poisoning took the life of her brother, Christopher Valdez, who had served in the U.S. Army. During those years 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. Her election followed more than twenty years in legal education. Suzanne Valdez joined the University of Kansas School of Law faculty in 1999 and served as a Clinical Professor of Law through 2021. She taught Professional Responsibility, Prosecutorial Ethics, and State Court Practice, along with workshops in deposition skills and expert witness examination. She ran the law school's Criminal Prosecution Field Placement Program, its Externship Clinic, and its LL.M. program in Elder Law, and she supervised students practicing at the Douglas County Legal Aid Society. Her colleagues named her Connell Teaching Professor in 2019, she collected the Immel Award for Teaching Excellence twice, and she presided over the KU University Senate in 2019 and 2020. What she taught, she also wrote. The third edition of Prosecutorial Ethics, published in the American Casebook Series by West Publishing, carries her name alongside Professor R. Michael Cassidy's. Her chapter appears in Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade, issued by University of California Press in 2024. Her law review and bar journal writing includes a policy paper on low-level, non-violent female drug offenders in Kansas, and she put together Practice in Kansas, a course text covering civil procedure, landlord-tenant law, consumer protection, and family law. She has delivered roughly 100 professional presentations, and a new book drawn from her years in prosecution is in progress. The courtroom years came first. Valdez started at Kansas Legal Services in 1996, representing low-income clients in Kansas City, Kansas, in civil and criminal matters and federal disability and housing litigation. She returned to prosecution twice in the Wyandotte County District Attorney's Office as a special prosecutor, from 2005 to 2008 and from 2017 to 2020, handling high-level felony conflict of interest cases. She spent 2008 on 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. She held an Of Counsel role at Smith Legal, LLC, from 2009 to 2021, representing private and pro bono clients in civil matters in Kansas state court. Statewide appointments accumulated. Suzanne Valdez spent eight years as chair of the Kansas Crime Victims Compensation Board, whose fund for survivors of violent crime averaged roughly $3 million annually. Her nomination to the chairmanship came from two Kansas Attorneys General, and the Kansas Senate confirmed her unanimously three separate times. She chaired the Kansas Continuing Legal Education Commission, served on the Kansas Judicial Council's Family Law Advisory Committee and on the Kansas Supreme Court's Access to Justice Committee, and sat on American Bar Association law school accreditation teams. Her volunteer record is long. She has sat on the board of Douglas County CASA and on that of the Douglas County Child Advocacy Center, an organization serving children who have been abused or neglected. She has given time to LINK, the Lawrence interdenominational nutrition kitchen, led a unit at Hidden Valley Girl Scout Camp, worked with Mentoring4Success supporting women returning to their communities after incarceration, and served as an admissions field representative for the United States Military Academy at West Point. While she was based in Kansas City, her volunteering included support for transgender women in the Missouri Department of Corrections and on probation and parole. The Lawrence Army Recruiting Station gave her a Certificate of Appreciation in Recognition of Women's History Month in March 2024, after she directed her office to clear outstanding tickets and petty misdemeanors for Army recruits so they could report to basic training. Her credentials begin at the University of Kansas School of Law, where she earned a J.D. in 1996, served on the Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy, and received the Walter Hiersteiner Outstanding Service Award. Before that she took a B.S. in business administration, awarded with Highest Distinction, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her law licenses are in Kansas and Missouri, and she belongs to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Home is 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 behind her, but she still runs. Historical fiction, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic fill her reading, and she follows Jayhawk sports closely.