Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
He is the author, most recently, of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard: 2015), Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience with Michael Taussig and W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press: 2013) and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press: 2011). Harcourt is the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1972–73 lectures at the Collège de France, “La Société punitive” (Gallimard: 2013), and the co-editor of the lectures Foucault delivered at Louvain in 1981, “Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice” (University of Chicago Press: 2014).
Harcourt 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).
Harcourt is also an active death row lawyer, having represented inmates sentenced to death in Alabama since 1990. He continues to represent inmates on a pro bono basis today.