Carol Steiker

Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law

Special Advisor for Public Service

Biographical Statement

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), and she is co-author of the Kadish, Schulhofer & Steiker casebook, Criminal Law and Its Processes (8th ed. Aspen 2007). 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 Assistant 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 (upper-level) and Voices From Inside the Criminal Justice System (1L). 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 and as a first-year Section Leader. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation 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 the Massachusetts legislature.

Appointments

• Assistant Professor of Law, 1992 - 1998
• Faculty Associate, Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, 1997 - present
• Professor of Law, 1998
• Associate Dean, 1998 - 2001
• Special Advisor for Public Service, 2003 - present
• Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law, 2007 - 2011
• Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, 2011

Education

• Harvard-Radcliffe A.B. 1982, History and Literature
• Harvard Law School J.D. 1986

Research Interests

• Capital Punishment
• Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure

Subject Areas for Accepting Press Inquiries

• Criminal Defense
• Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure ( police investigations, the trial process, plea bargaining, sentencing)
• Death Penalty

Subject Areas for Supervising Written Work

• Capital Punishment
• Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Legal Ethics

Other Information

2011-2012 Faculty Disclosures re: Related Outside Interests and Activities

Representative Publications

• Steiker, Carol. "Tempering or Tampering? Mercy and the Administration of Criminal Justice" in Forgiveness, Mercy and Clemency (Austin Sarat & Nasser Hussain eds., Stanford University Press, 2007).
  
• Sanford, Kadish, Stephen Schulhofer & Carol Steiker. Criminal Law and Its Processes: Cases and Materials (Aspen 8th ed. 2007).
  
• Criminal Procedure Stories (Carol Steiker ed., Foundation Press Law Stories Series 2006).
  Full text: AMAZON (Purchase)
  
• Steiker, Carol & Jordan Steiker. "A Tale of Two Nations: Implementation of the Death Penalty in "Executing" Versus "Symbolic" States in the United States," 84 Texas Law Review 1869 (2006).
  
• Steiker, Carol & Jordan Steiker. "Seduction of Innocence: The Attraction and Limitations of the Focus on Innocence in Capital Punishment Law and Advocacy," 95 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 587 (2005).
  
• Steiker, Carol. "No, Capital Punishment is Not Morally Required: Deterrence, Deontology, and the Death Penalty," 58 Stanford Law Review 751 (2005).
  
• Steiker, Carol. "Capital Punishment and American Exceptionalism" in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Michael Ignatieff ed., Princeton University Press, 2005).
  

Bibliography

View bibliography