Burke received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, completing the senior thesis "Emotion's effects on memory: spatial narrowing of attention." She went on to Stanford Law School in California, graduating as a member of Order of the Coif. After law school, she served as a judicial clerk to Betty Binns Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then as a Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney in Portland, where she prosecuted domestic violence offenses and served as an in-precinct advisor to the police department.