Already a writer, a mother and a wife and after one disconcerting year of law school our family set off for a research trip with my husband, Princeton Professor of Politics Henry Bienen, to Ibadan, Nigeria. I had no idea what I would do there but, as I told my law school Dean, I would do some kind of legal research and hope to get law school credit for the work.  

This was the early 1960s, long before the Internet-as-we-know-it, when both postal and telephone communications were unreliable. Within Nigeria people often drove hundreds of miles to deliver an important message and wait for its reply.

Nigeria was then licking its wounds after a brutal civil war. A President from the Army had recently excised most civil rights provisions from the post-colonial constitution; and heavily armed, unsmiling police and soldiers were everywhere. A newly created Armed Robbery Tribunal, made up of a Police Officer, an Army Officer and a trial court Judge conducted extra-legal prosecutions.

Death was the mandatory sentence upon conviction. There was no appeal to the judiciary.

Public executions in the bay at Lagos were attended by thousands; parents held children up to see, and to hear the last words: often defiant rather than repentant, and enthusiastically reported by a thriving tabloid press. Sharks cleaned up the mess.  This was Dickens’ London.

I read every book in English in the Ibadan University Library, and was inspired by the 1950s work of the African anthropologist, Paul Bohannon. I decided to try and replicate his research template on homicide data collection that had been sent out to District Commissioners in former British colonies: Analyze and look for patterns in about 100 homicides and however many  suicides within your jurisdiction. Undeterred by skeptics, I began poking around in a search for 100 cases of homicide.

One day, while damp and sweating in a tiny attic room above the sumptuous courtroom of the State Supreme Court, I found the handwritten summaries of all cases decided by that court since Independence. Buried within were my 100 homicide cases. 114 actually.

The University of Ibadan was then a thriving, mixed community. I found someone to teach me the rudiments of academic data collection and statistical analysis, even as the first computing center at the University of Ibadan was being built.

Meanwhile, the murders, the armed robberies, and the public executions were continuing and being reported. There was a small subset of murders involving witchcraft in my 114 cases. While writing and reading, I decided to observe each stage of the legal progression to a conviction for murder being upheld by the state’s highest court. This, not the summary hearings of the Armed Robbery Tribunal, would be the way in which my cases reached the State’s highest court whose records I was analyzing. That’s when the real research started.

Before graduating from law school, I had two professional publications—one a straightforward analysis of homicide in Western Nigeria, Criminal Homicide in Western Nigeria 1966-1972, and the other a small study of the insanity defense and the witchcraft cases, The Determination of Criminal Insanity in Western Nigeria.

Most important, however, was that I had found the territory— murder, capital punishment, and the vagaries of the law—which would absorb me for the next several decades, leading me to my first job, (as a writer and researcher on the laws of rape and sexual assault, at the time when all legal definitions were changing); then to my second position (teaching at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law); and then to my third job, as a Public Defender in New Jersey, where I spent more than a decade doing research on murder and a proportionality review of prosecutorial discretion after the reimposition of capital punishment in that State.

Later, in 1995, after teaching law at the Woodrow Wilson School and elsewhere, I again followed my husband, Henry Bienen, to Northwestern University: he to be President,  I as law teacher.

In Chicago, to my profound and continuing surprise, I found myself in the middle of a hotbed of politics and advocacy about death penalty prosecutions in Illinois.

One result was the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, with its own homicide data set and a website, Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930, my first collaboration with the designer, Mark Swindle. This website has attracted more than 1.5 million visitors.

Meanwhile, I had fallen in love with the history of Chicago, especially the deeply idealistic dedication of socialists, progressives…and sometimes the charismatic corrupt politicians…all of whom left voluminous records of their lives and public work—in law, biography, and other easily retrievable published written records, such as contemporaneous newspapers and pamphlets and books.

Among the most brilliant writers was Florence Kelley, socialist, mother, reformer, the first statewide Factory Inspector in Illinois and a graduate of our Northwestern University School of Law.

How could I not write a book about her? The result was: Florence Kelley, Factory Inspector in 1890’s Chicago, and the Children, and the companion website: The Life and Times of Florence Kelley, Florence Kelley in Chicago 1891-1899. The website’s Archives incorporated more than 30,000 pages of now publicly-available legal records, books, treatises, statistics and photographs, including the original 1890s Reports of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois, with their rich historical and genealogical information.

This website was followed by other legal websites—dedicated to making available legal documents and public records publicly available on the web to anyone anywhere in the world— including Illinois Murder Indictments 2000-2010; Illinois Judges; and 2003 Chicago Murders.

A through line in all this work has been a fascination with law and authority in all its manifestations, and with public performances of lives on and off the stage.

My next project, Dinner, is a performance piece inspired by the life and work of Thornton Wilder, a collaboration with NYC theatre artist, Gwynn MacDonald.

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EDUCATION

BAR ADMISSIONS

PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT

GRANTS AND AWARDS

PUBLICATIONS IN LAW

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECTS

OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

TEACHING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

TEACHING AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL AND ELSEWHERE

OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES