Vera Institute of Justice

Bernard Harcourt discusses rethinking criminal justice research methods. This interview is part of the Neil A. Weiner Research Speaker Series which invites prominent researchers to speak about their work on justice issues. For more information see:

Bernard E. Harcourt studies and writes about punishment and political economy. He is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, the Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author, most recently, of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011), and Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience with Michael Taussig and W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press 2013). He is the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive (Gallimard 2013), and the co-editor of the lectures Foucault delivered at Louvain in 1981, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Chicago 2014). He is author of several other books, including Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), which won the Gordon J. Laing Prize in 2009, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). He is also an active death row lawyer, having represented inmates sentenced to death in Alabama since 1990, and continues that work on a pro bono basis representing inmates today.