Adriaan Lanni

Adriaan Lanni teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Adjudication, Restorative Justice, the Criminal Justice Workshop, and Ancient Law. Her research focuses on ancient law and society and modern criminal justice reform, with a focus on restorative justice. Both of Lanni’s research interests in ancient and modern law are motivated by a desire to explore what community-centered justice might look like, what its limits are, and how far our own system has moved from any genuinely democratic method of adjudication. Her books include Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens (CUP 2006) and Law and Order in Ancient Athens (CUP 2016), and the edited volume Global History of Crime Volume 1: Antiquity (forthcoming). Her publications on restorative justice include Taking Restorative Justice Seriously (Buffalo Law Review 2021). She is one of nineteen law professors who proposed a suite of reforms to democratize criminal justice in the White Paper of Democratic Criminal Justice (Northwestern Law Review 2017). Since 2018 she has served as a volunteer facilitator and case coordinator with Communities for Restorative Justice.

Before joining Harvard Law School in 2005, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Dana Fabe of the Alaska Supreme Court. She received a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale University, an M.Phil. in Classics from Cambridge University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.