William Stuntz

As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo '08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.

In a comprehensive review published Oct. 20 by the New York Review of Books, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens provides thoughtful analysis of the recently published book "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice," by the late Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz.

Since William Stuntz’s death on March 15 at age 52, the renowned scholar of criminal justice at Harvard Law School and evangelical Christian has been eulogized in many ways, from the service at Park Street Church, to quotations in numerous obituaries, to the postings from his former students on an HLS journal site, to the appreciation on the New York Times editorial page. Below are excerpts from some of those remembrances.

The New York Times published an editorial appreciation of the late William J. Stuntz of the Harvard Law School faculty, on March 23.

William Stuntz, a renowned scholar of criminal justice at Harvard Law School,  an evangelical Christian and a teacher much beloved by students and colleagues, died March 15 after a long battle with cancer.

Legal academia is not famous for collective displays of appreciation, and even less so for the humility of its members. So the celebration of the work of William Stuntz held at Harvard Law School on March 26 and 27 was doubly extraordinary.

William Stuntz, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is an expert on criminal law and procedure and crime policy. He has co-written a casebook on criminal procedure and published numerous articles on all aspects of the criminal justice system, in law reviews, journals, and periodicals.

The Laws in Wartime Professor Jack Goldsmith
Slate Magazine, April 2 “We are surprisingly close to putting policy issues in the war on terrorism on…

Harvard Law School Professors William J. Stuntz and Elizabeth Warren are amongst the new class of members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious scholarly societies. Members are chosen on the basis of "preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large."

The following article, The inconvenient truths of 2008, written by Harvard Law School Professor William J. Stuntz, was published in The Weekly Standard on February 18, 2008.

Professor William Stuntz formally accepted the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law chair on February 6. After an introduction by Dean Elena Kagan '86, Stuntz marked the occasion with a lecture entitled "Fighting Wars and Fighting Crime."

Several school boards have recently mandated that science curricula include the teaching of intelligent design--the theory that all advanced life forms are so complex that they must have been designed by an intelligent force.

The following essay, The Truman Show: In choosing Miers, Bush pulled a Truman, by Professor William Stuntz originally appeared in The New Republic Online on October 4, 2005: What kind of president picks both John Roberts and Harriet Miers? They look like the ultimate odd couple. Roberts is not a Bush crony, he has a résumé to die for, and everyone who knows him says he's unbelievably smart. Miers is more than a crony but certainly not less.

George W. Bush has lost his favorite Supreme Court Justice. No, Antonin Scalia has not quietly resigned. (Does Scalia quietly do anything?) And yes, Bush does like to say that Scalia is his favorite Justice. But I have a sneaking suspicion his heart beats faster for William Rehnquist.

On Jan. 12, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the strict and sometimes unforgiving sentencing guidelines that have tied the hands of federal judges for nearly 20 years would no longer bind them.

In what Dean Robert Clark '72 called a "stunning addition" to the criminal law faculty, University of Virginia Law School Professor William Stuntz will move north to Harvard in July.