List of Guest Speakers
Robert Blecker
Robert Blecker is a Professor Emeritus of Criminal Law and Constitutional History at New York Law School. He has been widely regarded as a leading retributivist advocate of punishment for all but only those who deserve it. He is a former Special Assistant Attorney General, NY in the office of the special Anticorruption Prosecutor. He has published the booklength: Haven or Hell: Inside Lorton Central Prison – Experiences of Punishment Justified. (42 Stanford Law Review #5, 1990) – based upon 12 years inside the nation’s only all-Black prison system. His book, The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst (2013) utilizes decades inside prisons to analyze and critique the justifications and limits of punishment, especially the death penalty, with the actual experiences and conditions of those punished.
Lawrence Douglas
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of seven books, his most recent titled “Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020 (Twelve/Hachette 2020). The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, Douglas has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Waverly Duck
Waverly Duck is an urban sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problem 2016 C. Wright Mills Book Award. He teaches on a wide number of topics, including urban sociology, inequality (race, class, gender, health, and age), qualitative methods, culture, communication, ethnomethodology, and ethnography. His current research involves several projects focusing on gentrification, displacement, and food apartheid.
David Reed Karp
David Karp is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Skidmore College, where he teaches courses in criminology and criminal justice. He conducts research on community-based responses to crime and has given workshops on restorative justice and community justice nationally. Currently, he is engaged in a qualitative research study examining Vermont’s community reparative probation boards and is a member of the New York State Community Justice Forum. He is the author of more than 30 academic articles and technical reports and two previous books—Community Justice: An Emerging Field and The Community Justice Ideal: Preventing Crime and Achieving Justice (with Todd Clear).
Adriaan Lanni
Adriaan Lanni is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Adjudication, Restorative Justice, the Criminal Justice Workshop, and Ancient Law. Her research focuses on ancient law and society and modern criminal justice reform, with a focus on restorative justice. Both of Lanni’s research interests in ancient and modern law are motivated by a desire to explore what truly “popular” justice might look like, what its limits are, and how far our own system has moved from any genuinely democratic method of adjudication. Her books include Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens (CUP 2006) and Law and Order in Ancient Athens (CUP 2016).
James R. Martel
James Martel is a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of seven books and one edited volume. One of his books is titled "Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead" (Amherst College Press, 2018).
Linda Ross Meyer
Professor Meyer has been working at Quinnipiac Law School since 1994 and teaches criminal law, constitutional law, and legal theory, among other subjects. Before joining the faculty at Quinnipiac, Meyer served as a law clerk for Judge Charles A. Legge (N.D. Cal.), Judge William A. Norris (9th Cir.), and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She is also the author of The Justice of Mercy (U. Mich Press 2010) and Sentencing in Time (Amherst On-Line 2017), and many articles and book chapters on criminal responsibility, sentencing, and legal theory.
Naomi Murakawa
Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She studies the reproduction of racial inequality in 20th and 21st century American politics, with specialization in crime policy and the carceral state. She is the author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014), and her work has appeared in Law & Society Review, Theoretical Criminology, Du Bois Review, and several edited volumes. She has received fellowships from Columbia Law School’s Center for the Study of Law and Culture, as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Program.
Keramet Ann Reiter
Keramet Reiter is a professor of Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California Irvine. She studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems. She uses a variety of methods in her work — including interviewing, archival and legal analysis, and quantitative data analysis — in order to understand both the history and impact of criminal justice policies, from medical experimentation on prisoners and record clearing programs to gun control laws and the use of long-term solitary confinement in the United States and internationally.
Paul H. Robinson
Paul Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former federal prosecutor and counsel for the US Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. He is the author or editor of 18 books, including the standard lawyer’s reference on criminal law defenses, three Oxford monographs on criminal law theory, a highly regarded criminal law treatise, and an innovative case studies course book.
Ashley T. Rubin
Ashley Rubin is an associate professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, with a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley. She focuses on the way punishment changes in different societies at different times. She has two books: The Deviant Prison and Rocking Qualitative Social Science, along with many other publications.
Leo Zaibert
Leo Zaibert is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at Union College, primarily focused on understanding conceptual and normative aspects of different responses to wrongdoing. He has published two books on these themes and is now interested in exploring the idea of forgiveness.