Steven L. Winter
Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law, & Director, Center for Legal Studies
Office: Room 3329
Telephone: (313) 577-1053
E-mail: swinter@wayne.edu
Website: Click Here
EDUCATION:
B.A., Yeshiva University;
J.D., Columbia University School of Law
COURSES TAUGHT:
Constitutional Law
Federal Courts
Jurisprudence
Legal Process
Civil Procedure
Seminar on Contemporary Problems in Legal Theory
Seminar on Ethics of the Lawyering Experience
Steven L. Winter joined the Wayne State University Law School in 2002 as the Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law and the Director of the Center for Legal Studies. 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 and, most recently, What Makes Modernity Late?. 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.
