CANCELED - Guest Speaker: Carol Steiker – Death Penalty Abolitionist

Join the Department of History and Professor Albert Wu for this fascinating event as Professor Steiker from Harvard Law talks about the abolition of the death penalty. 

Prof. Carol Steiker

Carol Steiker is the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law. Her primary interest is the broad field of criminal justice, where her work ranges from substantive criminal law to criminal procedure to institutional design, with a special focus on issues related to capital punishment. Professor Steiker served on the board of Editors of the Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice (2nd ed. Macmillan 2002), she is the editor of Criminal Procedure Stories (Foundation 2006), she is a co-editor with Michael Klarman and David Skeel of The Political Heart of Criminal Procedure: Essays on Themes of William J. Stuntz (Cambridge University Press 2012), and she is a co-author of the Kadish, Schulhofer, Steiker & Barkow casebook, Criminal Law and Its Processes (9th ed. Aspen 2012). Recent publications address topics such as the relationship of criminal justice scholarship to law reform, the role of mercy in the institutions of criminal justice, and the likelihood of nationwide abolition of capital punishment.

Courses taught by Professor Steiker have included Criminal Law, Advanced Criminal Procedure (both Investigation and Adjudication), Capital Punishment in America, Thinking About Law Teaching (with Professor Todd Rakoff), Criminal Justice Workshop (with Professor Adriaan Lanni), and Justice and Mercy in Jewish and Christian Tradition and American Criminal Law (with Professor Sarah Coakley of the Harvard Divinity School). Professor Steiker has offered reading groups on Criminal Justice Theory and Voices From Inside the Criminal Justice System.

Professor Steiker is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges and Harvard Law School, where she served as president of the Harvard Law Review, the second woman to hold that position in its then 99-year history. After clerking for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, she worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent defendants at all stages of the criminal process. She has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty since 1992, where she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1998-2001 and where she currently serves as the Dean's Special Advisor for Public Service. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Steiker has worked on pro bono litigation projects on behalf of indigent criminal defendants, including death penalty cases in the United States Supreme Court. She has also served as a consultant and an expert witness on issues of criminal justice for non-profit organizations and has testified before Congress and state legislatures.

Source: https://ethics.harvard.edu/people/carol-steiker