Brian Sheppard

Climenko Fellow

Lecturer on Law

Additional Information

Mr. Sheppard will teach a section of First Year Legal Research and Writing in both the Fall Term 2009 and the Spring Term 2010.

Biographical Statement

Brian is pursuing his S.J.D. at Harvard Law School, where he received his LL.M. (waived) in 2005. He clerked for Judge Levin Campbell of the First Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Martha Sosman of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. He received his J.D., cum laude, from Boston College Law School. For years, he worked on criminal and immigration cases as a staff attorney at the First Circuit. Brian's scholarly interests include jurisprudence, professional responsibility, New Legal Realism, law and psychology, and legal history. His current project is a jurisprudential and empirical analysis of legal constraint on judicial decision making. His publications include Evaluating Norms: An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship Between Norm-Content, Operator, and Charitable Behavior, 63 Vand. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (2010) (lead author, with Fiery Cushman), "Josiah Quincy, Jr." in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (2009), and Attitude Issues: The Difficulty of Using Personal and Ideological Characteristics to Predict Justice Martha B. Sosman's Decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 42 New Eng. L. Rev. 407 (2008) (invited submission, lead article).