About the Authors
Ronald J. Allen
Education
B.S., magna cum laude, Marshall University
J.D., magna cum laude, University of Michigan
Background
Professor Allen is the John Henry Wigmore Professor of Law at Northwestern University, in Chicago, IL. He did his undergraduate work in mathematics at Marshall University and studied law at the University of Michigan. He is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of evidence, procedure, and constitutional law. He has published five books and approximately eighty articles in major law reviews. The New York Times referred to him as one of nation's leading experts on evidence and procedure. He has been quoted in national news outlets hundreds of times, and appears regularly on national broadcast media on matters ranging from complex litigation to constitutional law to criminal justice.
Professor Allen began his career at the State University of New York, and has held professorships at the University of Iowa and Duke University prior to coming to Northwestern. He has lectured on his research at distinguished universities across the world, among them Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Duke University, Oxford University, University of London, Leiden University, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Edinburgh, University of British Columbia, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), Parma University, Turin University, Pavia University, University of Adelaide, Australia, and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and UNAM, Mexico City. In 1991, he was the University Distinguished Visiting Scholar, at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. One of his books has been translated into Chinese by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and he has been invited to China for a series of lectures in the summer of 2004 and the spring of 2005. He has also been invited to lecture by the governments of Mexico and Trinidad/Tobago. For the last ten years, his research has focused on the nature of juridical proof. He has been involved as a consultant on numerous cases involving complex litigation in the United States and abroad.
He is a member of the American Law Institute, has chaired the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and was Vice-chair of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence Committee of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section. He has served as a Commissioner of the Illinois Supreme Court, assigned to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. He is presently on the Boards of the Constitutional Rights Foundation-Chicago, and the Yeager Society of Scholars of Marshall University. He is, or has served, on various boards and committees of civic and cultural institutions in Chicago.
Publications
- Deadly Dilemmas II: Bail and Crime, 85 chicago-kent law review 23-42, 2010 (with Larry Laudan)
- Theorizing About Self-Incrimination, 30 cardozo law review 729-750, 2008
- Utility and Truth in the Scholarship of Mirjan Damaška, crime, procedure and evidence in a comparative and international context: essays in honour of professor mirjan damaška 329-350, 2008 (with Georgia N. Alexakis)
- From the Enlightenment to Crawford to Holmes: Address at the Association of American Law Schools Evidence Conference, 39 seton hall law review 1-16, 2009
- Moral Choices, Moral Truth, and the Eighth Amendment, 31 harvard journal of law & public policy 25-34, 2008
- Originalism and Criminal Law and Procedure, 11 chapman law review 277-306, 2008 (with Carol Steiker, Craig S. Lerner, Hon. Christopher A. Wray, and Hon. Edith Brown Clement)
Richard B. Kuhns
Education
A.B., Stanford University, 1964
LL.B., Stanford University, 1967
LL.M., University of Michigan, 1974
S.J.D., University of Michigan, 1978
Background
Prof. Kuhns is an expert on evidence and criminal procedure. He has translated his expertise to a casebook, "An Analytical Approach to Evidence: Text, Problems, and Cases," Little, Brown (1988). He has also written (with R. J. Allen) "Constitutional Criminal Procedure: An Examination of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments and Related Areas," Little, Brown (2d ed. 1991). Professor Kuhns was an adviser to the Iowa Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Rules of Evidence.
Eleanor Swift
Education
A.B., Radcliffe College, 1967
LL.B., Yale University, 1970
Background
Upon graduating from law school, Eleanor Swift clerked for Judge M. Joseph Blumenfeld of the U.S. District Court in Hartford and for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She then practiced in Houston with the firm of Vinson & Elkins.
Swift joined the Boalt faculty in 1979. She served as associate dean at Boalt from 1998 to 2000. She is also chair of the Committee on Professional Development of the Association of American Law Schools and is a past chair of the Evidence Section. From 1992 to 1997, she chaired a special faculty-student committee appointed by Dean Herma Hill Kay to develop a proposal for improving and expanding the clinical curriculum at Boalt. In 1998 she received Boalt's Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction and in 2000 she received UC Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award.
Swift's recent and forthcoming publications include "One Hundred Years of Evidence Law Reform: Thayer's Triumph" in the California Law Review (2000); "Rival Claims to 'Truth'" in Hastings Law Journal (1998); and Evidence: Text, Problems and Cases, 2nd ed. (with Allen and Kuhns, 1997).
David S. Schwartz
Education
J.D., Yale Law School, 1986
Articles Editor, Yale Law Journal.
M.A., Yale University, Political Science, 1986
B.A., Yale University, Magna cum laude, Economics & Political Science, 1981
Background
David Schwartz joined the UW Law faculty in fall 1999, after 12 years of law practice in which he specialized in employment discrimination and civil rights litigation. For the three years just prior to joining the Law School faculty, Prof. Schwartz was Senior Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, in Los Angeles. Previously, Prof. Schwartz was in private practice in San Francisco, representing plaintiffs in employment cases. After graduating law school, Prof. Schwartz clerked for the Honorable Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Professor Schwartz currently teaches Civil Procedure I, Evidence, and Constitutional Law, and he has also taught Civil Rights Litigation, Employment Law and Remedies. His scholarly interests currently focus on constitutional law and the civil litigation system.
