ALI member Carol Steiker, a Harvard Law professor, recently delivered a lecture on the history of the death penalty in the United States. In the talk, Professor Steiker argues that, over the last 50 years, capital punishment has become the subject of top-down, national regulation from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Elected to ALI in 2013, Professor Steiker is well known to many ALI members as the co-author, along with her brother, University of Texas law professor Jordan Steiker, of a study in 2009, which led to The American Law Institute’s vote to withdraw the capital punishment provisions in the Model Penal Code. Watch a video of Professor Steiker’s lecture at the Radcliffe Institute or read a February 2015 interview in which she talks about her work in the Harvard Gazette.