Bernard E. Harcourt
Speaker; Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Columbia Law School
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University; and directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Critique & Praxis (Columbia University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Lionel Trilling Prize, and of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018), Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2005) and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, 2011). He is also an active death penalty lawyer, currently representing inmates sentenced to death and to life imprisonment without parole in Alabama. He was recently awarded the Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award for his lifetime advocacy on behalf of individuals on death row.