B.A., Yeshiva University;
J.D., Columbia Law School

Constitutional Law
Federal Courts
The Regulatory State
Civil Procedure
Seminar on Ethics of the Lawyering Experience
Seminar on Consumerism and Democracy
Seminar on Contemporary Problems in Legal Theory

Steven L. Winter joined the Wayne State University Law School in 2002 as the Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law. Before coming to Wayne State, he was a member of the faculty at Brooklyn Law School (1997-2002) and the University of Miami School of Law (1986-1997). He has also taught at American University’s Washington College of Law and the Cardozo, Rutgers-Newark, and Yale Law Schools.

After law school, Professor Winter clerked for Judge Paul R. Hays of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1978 to 1986, he served as an Assistant Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., where he litigated a wide range of civil rights cases concerning prisoners’ rights, employment discrimination, school desegregation, police violence, capital punishment, habeas corpus jurisdiction, discrimination in the military, and attorneys’ fees. While at LDF, he worked on more than a dozen Supreme Court cases including brief and argument in Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), the landmark case holding the common law fleeing felon rule unconstitutional.

Professor Winter has served as a consultant for the Helsinki Watch Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2001, he filed a brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of Intellectual Property Creators and the Society of Amateur Scientists as amici curiae in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd., 532 U.S. 722 (2002), using developments in cognitive linguistics to argue successfully against reliance on the literal language in patent law.
 
Professor Winter  is the author of numerous articles on constitutional law and legal theory, including The Metaphor of Standing and the Problem of Self-Governance, Bull Durham and the Uses of Theory, An Upside/Down View of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, The “Power” Thing, Melville, Slavery, and the Failure of the Judicial Process, What Makes Modernity Late? and, most recently, Reimagining Democracy for Social Individuals. His book, A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life and Mind (Univ. Of Chicago Press 2001), is the first systematic attempt to assess cognitive science’s implications for law and legal theory. He teaches Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, Civil Procedure, and a variety of seminars on topics in legal theory which have included: Ethics of the Lawyering Experience; Contemporary Problems in Legal Theory; Theory of Property; Legal Reasoning;  Cognitive Science and Law; Law and Linguistics; and Racism, Cognitive Theory, and the Law.

Professor Winter is currently working on a book about consumerism and democracy.

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge University Press)
  
  

  

  The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought offers the most comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has ever been published. It is the successor volume to Andrew Ortony's groundbreaking Metaphor and Thought, first published in 1979 and updated in 1993. The essays in the current collection explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture, and artistic expression. Professor Winter's contribution explores the role of metaphor in legal thought, including its pivotal role in the maintenance of governmental accountability central to the ideal of "a government of laws and not of men."

  
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  Law and the Humanities An Introduction (Cambridge University Press)
  
  

  

  Law and the Humanities: An Introduction brings together a distinguished group of scholars from law schools and an array of the disciplines in the humanities. Contributors come from the United States and abroad in recognition of the global reach of this field. This book is, at one and the same time, a stock taking both of different national traditions and of the various modes and subjects of law and humanities scholarship. It is also an effort to chart future directions for the field. By reviewing and analyzing existing scholarship and providing thematic content and distinctive arguments, it offers to its readers both a resource and a provocation. Thus, Law and the Humanities marks the maturation of this ‘law and' enterprise and will spur its further development. This the first book of its kind in the field. It is interdisciplinary. It is global.

  
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  On Philosophy in American Law (Cambridge University Press) 2009 Contributor
  
  

  According to Cambridge University Press, this book gathers 38 leading scholars working in law and philosophy to provide focused and straightforward articulations of the role that philosophy might play at this juncture of American legal history. The volume marks the 75th anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's essay "On Philosophy in American Law," in which he rehearsed the broad development of American jurisprudence, diagnosed its contemporary failings, and then charted a productive path opened by the variegated scholarship that claimed to initiate a realistic approach to law and legal theory. The essays are written in the spirit of Llewellyn's article: they are succinct and direct arguments about the potential for bringing law and philosophy together.

  
  Click here for more info.
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  A Clearing in the Forest (University of Chicago Press) July 2001
  
  

  This book presents the first systematic assessment of cognitive science’s implications for law. Recent findings about categorization and reasoning reveal the remarkably orderly, yet creative processes of human imagination. Cognitive science provides the tools to understand how real-world legal actors reason, opening a window on the imaginative, yet orderly mental processes that animate thinking and decision making among lawyers, judges, and lay persons.

  
  Click here for more info.

Reimagining Democracy for Social Individuals, 45 ZYGON: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE (forthcoming 2010).

John Roberts’s Formalist Nightmare, 63 U. MIAMI L. REV. 549 (2009).

Re-Embodying Law, 58 MERCER L. REV. 869 (2007) (Symposium: Using Metaphor in Legal Analysis and Communication).

What Makes Modernity Late? 1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LAW IN CONTEXT 61 (2005) (inaugural issue).

Melville, Slavery, and the Failure of the Judicial Process, 25 CARDOZO L. REV. 2471 (2004) (Symposium on the 20th Anniversary of Richard Weisberg’s Failure of the Word).

Brown as Icon, 50 WAYNE L. REV. 849 (2004) (ABA Symposium to Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education).

When Self-Governance Is a Game, 67 BROOKLYN L. REV. 1171 (2002) (Cognitive Legal Studies: Cate¬gorization and Imagination in the Mind of the Law—A Symposium in Celebration of the Publication of A Clearing in the Forest).

Making the Familiar Conventional Again, 99 MICH. L. REV. 1607 (2001) (review essay).

What If Justice Scalia Took History and the Rule of Law Seriously?, 12 DUKE ENV’L LAW & POLICY FORUM 155 (2001) (Symposium on “Citizen Suits and the Future of Standing in the 21st Century: From Lujan to Laidlaw and Beyond”).

The Next Century of Legal Thought?, 22 CARDOZO L. REV. 747 (2001) (Symposium on Duncan Kennedy’s A Critique of Adjudication).

The “Power” Thing, 82 VA. L. REV. 721 (1996).
A Clearing in the Forest, Vol. 10, No. 3, METAPHOR & SYMBOLIC ACTIVITY 223 (1995).

Cursing the Darkness, 48 U. MIAMI L. REV. 1115 (1994) (comment symposium on the new poverty law scholarship).

The Constitution of Conscience, 72 TEXAS L. REV. 1805 (1994) (symposium on Philip Bobbitt’s Consti¬tutional Interpretation).

One Size Fits All, 72 TEXAS L. REV. 1857 (1994) (reply in same).

Human Values in a Postmodern World, 6 YALE J. L. & HUMANITIES 233 (1994) (colloquy with Martha Nussbaum).

Fast Food and False Friends in the Shopping Mall of Ideas, 64 U. COLO. L. REV. 965 (1993) (Rothgerber Conference).

Confident, But Still Not Positive, 25 CONN. L. REV. 893 (1993) (commentary on Frederick Schauer’s “Constitutional Positivism”).

For What It’s Worth, 26 LAW & SOCIETY REV. 789 (1992) (comment on presidential address).

The Meaning of “Under Color of” Law, 91 MICH. L. REV. 323 (1992).

Death Is the Mother of Metaphor, 105 HARV. L. REV. 745 (1992) (review essay).

Foreword: On Building Houses, 69 TEXAS L. REV. 1595 (1991) (introduction to “Beyond Critique: Symposium on Law, Culture, and the Politics of Form”).

An Upside/Down View of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, 69 TEXAS L. REV. 1881 (1991) (contribution to same).

Contingency and Community in Normative Practice, 139 U. PA. L. REV. 963 (1991) (contribution to “Symposium: The Critique of Normativity”).

Without Privilege, 139 U. PA. L. REV. 1063 (1991) (reply to Radin and Michelman in same).

Indeterminacy and Incommensurability in Constitutional Law, 78 CALIF. L. REV. 1441 (1990).

Bull Durham and the Uses of Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 635 (1990).

The Cognitive Dimension of the Agon Between Legal Power and Narrative Meaning, 87 MICH. L. REV. 2225 (1989) (contribution to “Symposium: Legal Storytelling”).

Transcendental Nonsense, Metaphoric Reasoning, and the Cognitive Stakes for Law, 137 U. PA. L. REV. 1105 (1989).

The Metaphor of Standing and the Problem of Self-Governance, 40 STAN. L. REV. 1371 (1988).

Tennessee v. Garner and the Democratic Practice of Judicial Review, 14 N.Y.U. REV. OF LAW & SOC. CHANGE 679 (1986).

Domestic Compliance with the Helsinki Accords: United States Prison Conditions and Human Rights, 8 N.E.J. ON PRIS. LAW 65 (1982).