September 19, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—James Q. Whitman, the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, will speak on the topic “Why Can’t We Protect the Guilty as Well as the Innocent? Understanding the Historical Development of the Criminal Trial” at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 4, in the Babbott Room in the Octagon at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and the Croxton Lectureship at Amherst College, Whitman’s talk is free and open to the public.
The author of a forthcoming book titled The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Religious Roots of the Criminal Trial, Whitman has published internationally and across disciplines, and has received many prizes and fellowships. His recent scholarship includes an article, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” published in the 2004 volume of The Yale Law Journal. His 2003 book, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, won the 2004 Distinguished Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.
Whitman earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School. He also holds an M.A. in European history from Columbia University and a Ph.D. degree in intellectual history from the University of Chicago. From 1988 to 1989, Whitman clerked for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He then began his teaching career at Stanford University Law School. He has taught as a visiting professor at universities in France and Italy and has been a professor at Yale Law School since 1994. In 1996 he became the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale.
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