A former federal prosecutor, Professor Paul Butler provides legal commentary for CNN, NPR, and the Fox News Network. He has been featured on 60 Minutes and profiled in the Washington Post. He has written for the Post, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times and is a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

After graduating cum laude from both Yale and Harvard Law School, Paul Butler clerked for the Honorable Mary Johnson Lowe of the U.S. District Court in New York. He then joined the law firm of Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in white collar criminal defense and civil litigation. Following his time in private practice, Professor Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. His prosecutions included a U.S. Senator, three FBI agents, and several other law enforcement officials. While at the Department of Justice, Professor Butler also served as a special assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuting drug and gun cases.

He was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Service Award three times by the GW graduating class and has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 2003, he was elected to the American Law Institute, one of America's most influential legal institutions.

His scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among other places. He has authored chapters in several books, written a column for the Legal Times, and published numerous op-ed articles, including in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Dallas Morning News. He lectures regularly for the ABA and the NAACP, and at colleges, law schools, and community organizations throughout the U.S. Professor Butler is also a regular contributor at BlackProf.com.

A collection of Paul Butler's academic articles is available on SSRN.

Books

• Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (The New Press, 2009)

Recent Articles

• If Hip-Hop Culture Reshaped Our Justice System... (WashingtonPost.com : December 1, 2009)
• On "Undercover Brothers," Conscience & Getting Free (American Constitutional Society Blog: November 25, 2009)
• Ten Things You Can Do to Reduce Incarceration (The Nation : October 28, 2009)
• Justice Department change is a welcome one (The Progressive Magazine: September 11, 2009)
• Were Obama's Race Remarks Too Risky?: 'Race Man' to the Rescue! (NYTimes.com: July 23, 2009)
• The Gates Case and Racial Profiling: More Ways of Looking at a Black Man (NYTimes.com: July 22, 2009)
• My Jury Service to America (The Huffington Post: July 1, 2009)
• Smarter Punishment Needed (Chicago Tribune: June 11, 2009)
• Jury Nullification: Power To The People (Prison Legal News)
• Obama picks the right man for drug czar (The Progressive: March 18, 2008)

Recent Interviews and Contributions

• Law Professor Paul Butler Drops Serious Science for the Funny Math of the Prison Population (Sia Timba Barnes, HipHopWired.com: October 19, 2009)
• Obama, Biden Sit Down for Beers With Gates, Crowley (Jake Tapper, ABCNews.com: July 30, 2009)
• Gates-gate: A Clear Case of "Contempt of Cop" (Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune: July 27, 2009)
• No N-Word, But Still Subtle Racial Prejudice (Susan Donald James, ABCNews.com: July 24, 2009)
• Should African-Americans Be Prosecutors? (Julia Dahl, The Crime Report: June 29, 2009)

Scholarly Articles

• When Judges Lie (and When They Should), 91 Minnesota Law Review 1785-1828 (2007)
• Blogging at Blackprof, 84 Washington University Law Review 1101-1104 (2006)
• Rehnquist, Racism, and Race Jurisprudence, 74 The George Washington Law Review 1019-1042 (2006)
• An Ethos of Lying (Colloquium: Zealous Advocacy in a Time of Uncertainty: Understanding Lawyers' Ethics), 8 University of the District of Columbia Law Review 269-274 (2004)
• In Defense of Jury Nullification, 31 Litigation 46-49 (Fall 2004)
• Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment, 56 Stanford Law Review 983 (2004)
• Should Radicals Be Judges? (Legal Ethics Conference: Judging Judges' Ethics), 32 Hofstra Law Review 1203-1214 (2004)
• The Case for Trials: Considering the Intangibles, 1 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 627-636 (2004)
• By Any Means Necessary: Using Violence and Subversion to Change Unjust Law, 50 UCLA Law Review 721-773 (2003)
• Foreword: Terrorism and Utilitarianism: Lessons from, and for, Criminal Law, 93 Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 1-22 (2002)
• Panel V: Promoting Racial Equality (with Todd D. Rakoff, Deborah A. Ramirez, and Christopher F. Edley), 9 Journal of Law and Policy 347-386 (2001)
• A Panel Discussion on a Proposed Code of Ethics for Legal Commentators (Panel Discussion with Raymond C. Brown, Erwin Chemerinsky, Johnnie L. Cochran,Jr., Laurie L. Levenson, John H. McElhaney, Barry C. Scheck, and Mary Tillotson), 50 Mercer Law Review 681-736 (1999)
• Must Congress End the Disenfranchisement of the District of Columbia? A Constitutional Debate (Panel Discussion with Raskin, Jamin B., Stephen Markman, and Adam Kurland), 48 American University Law Review 634-663 (1999)
• Retribution, for Liberals, 46 UCLA Law Review 1873-1893 (1999)
• Starr is to Clinton as Regular Prosecutors are to Blacks, 40 Boston College Law Review 705-716 (1999)
• The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Revisited (with Alex Kozinski, Cass R. Sunstein, Robin L. West, Alan M. Dershowitz, and Frank H. Easterbrook), 112 Harvard Law Review 1876-1923 (1999).
• Affirmative Action and the Criminal Law, 68 University of Colorado Law Review 841 (1997)
• Race-Based Jury Nullification: Case in Chief (The Role of Race-Based Jury Nullification in American Criminal Justice), 30 John Marshall Law Review 911-922 (1997)
• Race-Based Jury Nullification: Surrebuttal (The Role of Race-Based Jury Nullification in American Criminal Justice), 30 John Marshall Law Review 933-935 (1997)
• The Evil of American Criminal Justice: A Reply (Response to article by D. Leipold in this issue, p. 109), 44 UCLA Law Review 143-157 (1996)
• Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System, 105 Yale Law Journal 677-725 (1995)