Bernard E. Harcourt

Bernard E. Harcourt studies and writes about regimes of punishment and political economy. He is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, the Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He just moved to Columbia from the University of Chicago where he was the chairman of the political science department and Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science.

He is the author of a forthcoming book with Harvard University Press, titled "Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age," and published, most recently, "The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order" (Harvard University Press 2011), and "Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience" with Michael Taussig and W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press 2013).

He is the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, "The Punitive Society" (Gallimard 2013) and 1971-72 lectures, "Penal Theories and Institutions" (Gallimard 2015). He is also the editor responsible for the forthcoming edition of "Discipline and Punish" in the collected works of Foucault in the Pléiade edition at Gallimard. He is co-editor of the lectures Foucault delivered at Louvain in 1981, in French and English, "Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice" (Chicago 2014).

He is the author of several other books, including "Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age" (University of Chicago Press 2007), which won the Gordon J. Laing Prize in 2009, "Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy" (University of Chicago Press 2005), and "Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing" (Harvard University Press 2001).

He is also an active death row lawyer, having represented inmates sentenced to death in Alabama since 1990, and continues that work on a pro bono basis representing inmates today.