Carol S. Steiker

Carol Steiker is the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she serves as the Dean’s Special Advisor for Public Service. She also previously served as Faculty Co-Director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Policy Program. Steiker specializes in the broad field of criminal justice, where her work ranges from substantive criminal law to criminal procedure to institutional design, with a special focus on capital punishment. She is co-editor of Comparative Capital Punishment and co-author of Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

Steiker is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as president of the Harvard Law Review, the second woman to hold that position in its then 99-year history. After clerking for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, she worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent defendants at all stages of the criminal process. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Steiker has done pro bono work for indigent criminal defendants, including death penalty cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, and she was appointed to the board of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the statewide public defender for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.