Prof. Robert Blecker

Robert Blecker is a Professor of Law at New York Law School, where he teaches Criminal Law, Constitutional History, and Criminals and Our Urge to Punish Them. He is also a nationally known retributivist advocate of the death penalty.

At Harvard Law School, where he won the Oberman Prize for the best graduating thesis, Professor Blecker was one of only two students to publicly defend the death penalty.

Professor Blecker still espouses his carefully considered, yet almost universally unpalatable position in the academic community. Based on 13 years of interviewing convicted killers, and hundreds of hours inside maximum security prisons and on death rows, he makes a case for the death penalty as retribution, but only for the “worst of the worst” offenders.

The sole keynote speaker supporting the death penalty at major conferences and at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he was also the lone American advocate at an international conference in Geneva on the death penalty sponsored by Duke University Law School.

Professor Blecker frequently appears in The New York Times, on PBS, CourtTV, CNN, BBC World News, and other major media outlets.

J.D., Harvard Law School
B.A., Tufts University

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