Women’s History Month Profile Series: Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School Professor

This month, DPIC cel­e­brates Women’s History Month with week­ly pro­files of notable women whose work has been sig­nif­i­cant in the mod­ern death penal­ty era. The third entry in this series is Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker, a renowned edu­ca­tor and influ­en­tial death penalty scholar. 

Professor Steiker began her legal career as a clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Steiker clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall and has attrib­uted her inter­est in and knowl­edge of the death penal­ty to him. After her clerk­ships, Professor Steiker worked at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she defend­ed indi­gent crim­i­nal defen­dants. She has rep­re­sent­ed crim­i­nal defen­dants in all stages of the crim­i­nal process, includ­ing argu­ing death penal­ty cas­es in front of the Supreme Court. 

At Harvard, Professor Steiker is the fac­ul­ty spon­sor of the Capital Punishment Clinic, and the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, spe­cial­iz­ing in crim­i­nal jus­tice and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. In addi­tion to her work on indi­vid­ual cas­es, Professor Steiker has served as a con­sul­tant and expert wit­ness on the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and cap­i­tal punishment issues. 

Her 2016 book, Courting Death, which she co-authored with her broth­er and fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor, University of Texas Law Professor Jordan Steiker, exam­ined the U.S. Supreme Court’s decades-long efforts to reform the death penal­ty. In Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan called Courting Death, ​“the most impor­tant book about the death penal­ty in the United States — not only with­in the past gen­er­a­tion but, arguably, ever — because of its poten­tial to change how the coun­try thinks about capital punishment.” 

Professor Steiker also played a key role in the 2009 deci­sion of the American Law Institute (ALI) to remove the death penal­ty from its Model Penal Code. The ALI, a non­par­ti­san group of judges, schol­ars, and lawyers, com­mis­sioned Carol and Jordan Steiker to pro­duce a report on the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. Together, the Steikers called for ​“the rejec­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as a penal option under cur­rent cir­cum­stances” because ​“such a state­ment would reflect the view that the death penal­ty should not be imposed unless its admin­is­tra­tion can sat­is­fy a rea­son­able thresh­old of fair­ness and reli­a­bil­i­ty.” Since the pub­li­ca­tion of this report, six states have abol­ished the death penal­ty. In 2015, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court cit­ed the Steikers’ report in his dis­sent in Glossip v. Gross, where he opined that it was ​“high­ly like­ly that the death penal­ty vio­lates the Eighth Amendment.”