George P. Fletcher

George P. Fletcher (born March 5, 1939) is the Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law.[1]

Fletcher attended Cornell University from 1956 to 1959, studying mathematics and Russian. He received a B.A. in 1960 from University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. in 1964 from the University of Chicago. He studied at the University of Freiburg from 1964 to 1965 and received a Masters in Comparative Law in 1965 from the University of Chicago. He taught at the law schools of the University of Florida, University of Washington, and Boston College and then UCLA, from 1969 to 1983. Since then he has taught at Columbia Law School in New York where he was made Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law in 1989 and Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence in 1994. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Free University of Brussels, the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and Yale Law School.[2]

An internationally recognized scholar of criminal law, torts, comparative law, and legal philosophy, Fletcher is one of the most cited experts in the United States on criminal law.[3] The 2003 Propter Honoris Respectum issue of the Notre Dame Law Review was dedicated to the study of his work,[4] and symposia on his scholarship have been hosted by the Cardozo Law Review[5] and Criminal Justice Ethics.[6]

Fletcher's most widely-taught book Rethinking Criminal Law is a "well known time-honored classic of criminal law jurisprudence and the most cited scholarly book on criminal law second only to Glanville Williams Criminal Law: The General Part." The book was cited both by the majority opinion by Justice O'Connor and the dissenting opinion of Justice Brennan in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987). Fletcher was honored on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication with a "Symposium: Twenty-Five Years of George Fletcher's Rethinking Criminal Law."[7]

In 2013, Oxford University Press published Fletcher's Essays on Criminal Law, edited by Russell L. Christopher and with contributions by an international panel of leading scholars including Kyron Huigens, Douglas Husak, John Gardner, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan, Heidi Hurd, Susan Estrich, Peter Westen, Alon Harel, Joshua Dressler, Victoria Nourse, Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., Alan Wertheimer, and Stephen Schulhofer.[8]

In 1989, the American Bar Association awarded the Silver Gavel for outstanding lawbook of the year to Fletcher's study of the trial of the "subway vigilante," Bernard Goetz, "A Crime of Self-Defense." The bar noted the book probed the complex question of self-defense and its legal and moral implications for contemporary urban life.[9]

Fletcher has been active in several high-profile legal disputes. He was an expert witness in the Agent Orange case, presenting evidence for the court that the use of herbicides and defoliants violated international law as they were considered chemical weapons. However, the court ruled that the use of herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam were not meant to poison humans but to destroy plants which provided cover or concealment to the enemy, therefore Agent Orange fall under the category of herbicidal warfare. The court also used the British's use of Agent Orange during the Malayan Emergency to help dismissed the claims of people exposed to Agent Orange in their suit against the chemical companies that had supplied it.[10] His brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld argued that the customary law of war did not recognize the crime of conspiracy, and therefore the U.S. military commissions had no jurisdiction over a charge of conspiracy.[11] This argument was adopted by Justice Stevens in his opinion for the majority.[12]