About
I'm a lawyer and legal scholar. After graduating Michigan Law School I spent four years at the Office of the State Appellate Defender representing men and women who'd been convicted of felonies. I spent another four years as staff counsel for the Illinois branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, where I litigated first amendment and other constitutional issues, and also drafted and lobbied for passage of the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. I became a law professor in 1984 and have been teaching, writing, and speaking about my work ever since. My fields are criminal procedure, federal courts, and civil rights. In addition I am one of the founders of a new field: Law and Emotion. In 1996 I wrote my first article on this topic: Empathy, Narrative, and Victim Impact Statements. Since then I have written more than 50 law review articles on the topic, as well as numerous articles for popular audiences. In 2000 I published The Passions of Law with NYU Press. In 2021 I co-edited the Research Handbook on Law and Emotion for Edward Elgar. I am currently working on a book for general audiences on the role of emotion in the criminal justice system.
Featured Work
The Passions of Law
Do juries decide cases based on impermissible, or "lower hierarchy," emotions? Can judges be educated to recognize and train their compassion, hostility, revulsion or fear toward various litigants or causes of action? Can emotion be barred from the legal arena? THE PASSIONS OF LAW is the first anthology to treat the role that emotions play, don't play, and ought to play in the practice and conception of law and justice. Lying at the intersection of law, psychology, and philosophy, this emergent field of law scholarship raises some of the most profound and interesting questions at the heart of jurisprudence.
