William Stuntz, R.I.P.
It’s being reported that Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz died last week at the tragically young age of 52 (see the Times obit here). I never met Stuntz, but I’ve read and been deeply influenced by much of his writing. Indeed, I doubt there is any scholar who has had a more profound influence on my generation of criminal procedure professors than Stuntz. He contributed to a fundamental shift in the scholarly agenda from defining the proper scope of constitutional rights (which preoccupied the generation that came of age during the Warren Court crim pro revolution and the Burger Court counter-revolution) to studying how rights actually work in the real world of plea-bargaining, over-taxed criminal-justice systems, and dysfunctional tough-on-crime politics. In the real world, he taught us over and over again, the law on the books (whether Supreme Court decisions on constitutional rights or legislative decisions on substantive criminal law) doesn’t necessarily matter much, and well-meaning attempts to improve the law on the books are apt to backfire and produce even worse outcomes than the status quo.
Here are three insights I picked up from Stuntz that have been particularly important to my own work:
