Professor Bill Stuntz, In Memoriam

Harvard Law Professor Bill Stuntz died last week of cancer, at the too-early age of 52. He was a remarkable scholar of criminal law, but to many of us affiliated with Harvard Law & Policy Review, Professor Stuntz was also a beloved teacher, mentor, role model, boss, and friend.

As a tribute to Professor Stuntz, we are collecting and publishing personal reflections from people who knew him.  The entire series can be found here.

If you have a personal reflection of what Professor Stuntz meant to you that you would like to publish on this blog, please email stuntztribute@gmail.com. Shorter reflections can also be left in the comments to this or other posts. This entry is an introduction to the man and his work.

Professor Stuntz joined the Harvard faculty from the university of Virginia in 2000, and he immediately forged a close connection with his students. In 2004, he won the Sacks-Freund Teaching award, which is voted on by the graduating law students. In his time at Harvard, he taught essentially every criminal law course in the curriculum, including first-year criminal law, criminal procedure, and federal criminal law. Despite being diagnosed with cancer in February of 2008 and undergoing intense treatment for three years following that diagnosis, he continued to teach: two courses in 2008-2009, including a section of first-year criminal law; a reading group in 2009-2010; and a course in federal criminal law this past fall, which he taught knowing it would be his final “lap around the track,” as he put it on the last day of that course.

Professor Stuntz had comprehensive and complex views of the criminal justice system that are hard to put a label on — those on both the legal left and right find much to agree with in his work. For those unfamiliar with his scholarship, his seminal article The Pathological Politics of the Criminal Law is a good place to dig in. He completed a book to be published this fall that describes his views of the criminal justice system from both contemporary and historical points of view.

In addition to his legal scholarship, Professor Stuntz wrote frequently for a wider audience. Fittingly, excellent long-form essays of his can be found in both the conservative Weekly Standard and liberal New Republic (subscription req’d). He blogged occasionally about law, politics, and even his illness at “Less Than the Least.” He also wrote essays and gave several remarkable interviews to religious publications reflecting on what it was like to live life having been diagnosed with cancer. A characteristically wise and heartbreaking piece can be found here at Christianity Today.

Professor Stuntz will be dearly missed.