Erin Braatz

Biography

Erin Braatz joined Suffolk University Law School as an Assistant Professor of Law in 2018. Professor Braatz has a JD and PhD in Law & Society from New York University. She previously held a Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at NYU and completed clerkships with Judge Richard Stearns of the Eastern District of Massachusetts and Judge Juan Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Prior to clerking she worked as an associate at Sidley Austin in New York City. Throughout law school Professor Braatz worked in a variety of areas of criminal law, completing internships with, among others, the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.

Before attending graduate school she served as a Peace Corp Volunteer in Guinea, West Africa and worked with individuals seeking asylum in Houston, Texas. Professor Braatz's dissertation, Governing Difference: Penal Policy and State Building on the Gold Coast, 1844-1957, examines British criminal law and penal regimes in colonial West Africa and connects these practices to broader debates concerning governance and the global circulation of imprisonment as a technique of punishment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently working on turning the dissertation into a book manuscript. In addition to her work on criminal law in colonial settings, Professor Braatz also studies the history of the Eighth Amendment and its application in the United States. She is currently working on two projects that examine the evolving standards of decency standard as it has been understood and applied by the Supreme Court.

Education

• BA, Northwestern University
• JD, PhD New York University

Publications

Articles

• Erin Braatz, The Eighth Amendment's Milieu: Penal Reform in the Late Eighteenth Century, 106 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 405 (2016).