Brandon Garrett

Brandon L. Garrett joined the law faculty in 2005. His research and teaching interests include criminal procedure, wrongful convictions, habeas corpus, corporate crime, scientific evidence, civil rights, civil procedure and constitutional law. Garrett’s recent research includes studies of DNA exonerations and organizational prosecutions. The research web pages below provide data related to those studies.

Garrett’s recent book examining corporate prosecutions, titled “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations,” was published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2014. Translations are forthcoming in Spain and Taiwan. A new book titled “End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice,” examining the implications of the decline of the death penalty, is forthcoming in Fall 2017 from Harvard University Press. In 2011, Harvard University Press published Garrett’s book, "Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong," examining the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA testing. That book was the subject of a symposium issue in New England Law Review, and received an A.B.A. Silver Gavel Award, Honorable Mention, and a Constitutional Commentary Award. It was translated for editions in China, Japan and Taiwan. In 2013, Foundation Press published Garrett’s casebook, “Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation,” co-authored with Lee Kovarsky. Garrett’s work has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries, such as the Supreme Courts of Canada and Israel. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers, law enforcement, and to local and national media.

Garrett attended Columbia Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City.