Paul Butler | |
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| Born | Paul Delano Butler January 15, 1961 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Yale University (BA) Harvard University (JD) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Criminal law |
| Institutions | Georgetown University Law Center |
Paul Delano Butler (born January 15, 1961) [1] is an American lawyer, former prosecutor, and current law professor of Georgetown University Law Center. He is a leading criminal law scholar, particularly in the area of race and jury nullification. [2]
Butler was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory School. He received his B.A. degree cum laude from Yale University and his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School.
Butler clerked for the Honorable Mary Johnson Lowe of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. [2] He then joined the law firm of Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in white collar criminal defense and civil litigation. [3]
Following his time in private practice, Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. [3] While at the Department of Justice, Butler also served as a special assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuting drug and gun cases.
Butler is currently the Albert Brick Professor in Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, race relations law, and critical theory. [2]
His scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal , Harvard Law Review , Stanford Law Review , and UCLA Law Review . He has authored chapters in several books, written a column for the Legal Times , and published numerous op-ed articles, including in the Los Angeles Times , The Washington Post , and The Dallas Morning News . [2] He lectures regularly for the ABA and the NAACP, and at colleges, law schools, and community organizations throughout the U.S. [2] Butler was a regular contributor at BlackProf.com until its demise in 2009. [4] [5]
He was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Service Award three times by the Georgetown Law graduating class and has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. [2] In 2003, he was elected to the American Law Institute. In 2009, his first book, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, was published by The New Press. [6] His second book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men , was published by The New Press in 2017.
Gangsta rap or gangster rap, initially called reality rap, is a subgenre of rap music that conveys the culture and values typical of urban gangs, reality of the world and street hustlers. Emerging in the late 1980s, gangsta rap's pioneers include Schoolly D of Philadelphia and Ice-T of Los Angeles, later expanding in California with artists such as N.W.A and Tupac Shakur. In 1992, via record producer and rapper Dr. Dre, rapper Snoop Dogg, and their G-funk sound, gangster rap broadened to mainstream popularity.
The Georgetown University Law Center is the law school of Georgetown University, a private research university in Washington, D.C., United States. It was established in 1870 and is the largest law school in the United States by enrollment, with over 2000 students. It frequently receives the most full-time applications of any other law school in the United States.
Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, ordained minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
In the United States, the relationship between race and crime has been a topic of public controversy and scholarly debate for more than a century. Crime rates vary significantly between racial groups; however, academic research indicates that the over-representation of some racial minorities in the criminal justice system can in part be explained by socioeconomic factors, such as poverty, exposure to poor neighborhoods, poor access to public and early education, and exposure to harmful chemicals and pollution. Racial housing segregation has also been linked to racial disparities in crime rates, as blacks have historically and to the present been prevented from moving into prosperous low-crime areas through actions of the government and private actors. Various explanations within criminology have been proposed for racial disparities in crime rates, including conflict theory, strain theory, general strain theory, social disorganization theory, macrostructural opportunity theory, social control theory, and subcultural theory.
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
Hakeem Sekou Jeffries is an American politician and attorney who has served as House Minority Leader and Leader of the House Democratic Caucus since 2023. He has been the U.S. representative for New York's 8th congressional district since 2013 and was a member of the New York State Assembly from 2007 to 2012.
City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983), was a United States Supreme Court decision holding that the plaintiff, Adolph Lyons, lacked standing to challenge the Los Angeles city police department's use of chokeholds.
James B. Letten is an American attorney. A career prosecutor, Letten served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana for more than eleven years. By the time Letten resigned as U.S. Attorney in December 2012, he was the longest-serving U.S. Attorney in the country.
Rachel Elise Barkow is an American professor of law at the New York University School of Law. She is also faculty director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. Her scholarship focuses on administrative and criminal law, and she is especially interested in applying the lessons and theory of administrative law to the administration of criminal justice. In 2007, Barkow won the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU. In the fall of 2008, she served as the Beneficial Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Charles Alan Philips was an American writer and journalist. He was best known for his investigative reporting in the Los Angeles Times on the culture, corruption, and crime in the music industry during the 1990s and 2000s, which garnered both awards and controversy. In 1999, Philips won a Pulitzer Prize, with Michael A. Hiltzik, for their co-authored series exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old African American man, was killed in the New York City borough of Staten Island by Daniel Pantaleo, a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer, after the latter put him in a prohibited chokehold while arresting him. Video footage of the incident generated widespread national attention and raised questions about the use of force by law enforcement.
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, a Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Susan Bandes is an American lawyer and the current Centennial Distinguished Professor Emeritus at DePaul University. Bandes is considered one of the 20 most cited law professors in criminal law and procedure.
Erik Nielson is Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Richmond who has become well known as an expert in the use of rap music as evidence in criminal trials. His book Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America, with co-author Andrea Dennis, was published in November 2019 and received the Hugh Hefner Foundation First Amendment Award in October 2020. He was a consulting producer and interviewed for the documentary As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 and distributed by Paramount + starting on February 27, 2024. He has served as an expert in court cases, and his testimony has been cited to exclude rap lyric evidence.
Glenn Louis Kirschner is an American attorney, a former U.S. Army prosecutor, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and an NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst.
Chokehold: Policing Black Men is a 2017 non fiction book by Paul Butler. It was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Nonfiction category in 2018.
Ekow Nyansah Yankah is an American jurist who is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. His research considers criminal law, election law and police brutality.
Alvin Leonard Bragg Jr. is an American politician and lawyer who serves as the New York County District Attorney, covering Manhattan. In 2021, he became the first African American elected to that office. Bragg had previously served as Chief Deputy Attorney General of New York and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
Lara Bazelon is an American academic and journalist. She is a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law where she holds the Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy and directs the Criminal & Juvenile and Racial Justice Clinics. She is the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles. Her clinical work as a law professor focuses on the exoneration of the wrongfully convicted.
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