Professor Bernard Harcourt

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Political Science at Columbia University, the founding director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and directeur d’études (chaired professor) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. During 2016-2017, he is visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  

Professor Harcourt is the author most recently of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard 2015) and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard 2011). He is also the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures at the Collège de France, La Société punitive, of the 1971-1972 lectures, Theories et institutions pénales, and of the new Pléiade edition of Surveiller et punir in the collected works at Gallimard.

Professor Harcourt is also an active death row lawyer. He began representing inmates sentenced to death in Alabama in 1990 and continues that work on a pro bono basis today on cases challenging the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole.