Publications: Press
| Year | Title | Author | Publisher | Issue | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | A Stellar Journey | Mark Swindle and Leigh Bienen | Northwestern News (NEO) The Emeriti News | July 15, 2024 | A wide-angle look at Leigh's pre- and post-retirement eras [read more] |
| 2020 | Legal scholar’s new website offers a picture of the criminal justice system | Hilary Hurd Anyaso | Northwestern Now | May 29, 2020 | Using a small subset of death-eligible murder cases, a new database launched by a Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor offers a glimpse into the criminal justice system – more specifically the Circuit Court of Cook County pretrial detention system in the first six months of 2003 – and the bureaucracy surrounding them. [read more] |
| 2017 | Leigh Bienen and the Lookingglass Theatre | N/A | Lookingglass Theater | 2017 | Her work has been generously supported by The Joyce Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, The McCormick Tribune Foundation, and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. In 2009 she published an empirical study of the cost of capital punishment in Illinois which played a role in the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois. [read more] |
| 2016 | Leigh Bienen: a career from fiction writing to capital punishment | Joe Popely | Northwestern Now | Nov 3, 2016 | Podcast with the author, researcher and reformer who opens up about her winding, impactful career. [read more] |
| 2008 | Leigh B. Bienen and Florence Kelley | N/A | The New Historia | 2008 | Leigh B. Bienen is a Senior Lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law and a criminal defense attorney whose areas of expertise include capital punishment, sex crimes, and rape reform legislation. [read more] |
| 2007 | Rescued From Obscurity: 11,439 Stories of Life and Death in Chicago | David Thigpen | Chicago Tribune | Jan 21, 2007 | In the summer of 1998, researcher Leigh Buchanan Bienen spotted an article by Tribune reporter Charles Madigan describing the volumes and their contents: detailed records of every murder in the city between 1870 and 1930, and thus began a 6-year odyssey transforming the handwritten records into a dataset, then a robust interactive database-centric website containing the murder chronicles and a staggering amount of other data. [read more] |
| 2005 | Leigh Bienen Shares View of 'The Gates' | Leigh Bienen | Northwestern Now | Mar 1, 2005 | Leigh Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law, was in New York City in February to be a monitor for the installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates." Here is her diary of her days there. This diary originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. [read more] |
| 2005 | A diary: New York City just wild about saffron | Leigh Bienen | Chicago Tribune | Feb 18, 2005 | Leigh Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law, was in New York City this week to be a montior for the installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "The Gates." Here is her diary of her days there. [read more] |
| 2004 | Good old days? Not for killings - Homicide rate for 1930 nearly same as last year's | Frank Main | Chicago Sun-Times | June 8, 2004 | Chicago Tribune article announcing the launch of Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930 website, which received ~70k visits, and notes that the violence in the city now was about the same as then. [read more] |
| 2001 | Wives do things! | Nara Schoenberg | Chicago Tribune | Jun 13, 2001 | She's the spouse of a university president, but Leigh Buchanan Bienen is also a lawyer, professor and prize-winning short story writer. [read more] |
| 1998 | Crime Chicago Style | Charles M. Madigan and Tribune Staff Writer | Chicago Tribune | Aug 19, 1998 | After decades in the recesses of the of the Chicago Police Department at at 11th and State, the handwritten record of 11,000 Chicago murders from 1870-1930 were turned over to the Illinois State Archives. This article recounts the astonishment of Dottie Hopkins, archivist, as she salvaged the books; and also came to the attention of Leigh Beinen, beginning the transformation of the record into the website that has logged over 1.5 million visits since its launch in 2004. [read more] |
| 1996 | Study: Pollution worries women more | Jon Van | Chicago Tribune | Feb 12, 1996 | A discussion of pollution laws extends into changing attitudes of the relationship between men and women, including the use of capital punishment in the United States. [read more] |