My research explores current initiatives across the American legal landscape to rectify past wrongs. These include cold case prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations and official pardons. Consider the civil rights era cold cases: they have attracted the attention of historians of the civil rights movement and legal commentators in the fields of ethics and critical race theory, but useful theories of this retrial movement have yet to emerge. Some historians have argued that these cold case trials can contribute little to our understanding of the period or our outlook on today's racial issues. Not much can be gained, in this view, from a legal process that will inevitably run its course as participants pass away. These scholars take the view that the task of reconstructing the period is better suited for historians than for prosecutors.

In exploring these themes, I seek to define and classify the shared attributes of these criminal proceedings and to consider the motivations of state officials and community activists in reviving the cases. My preliminary conclusions are that despite its well-rehearsed limitations, the criminal trial process can repair and restore communities in a different manner from historical reconstruction, and that it can illuminate important truths that may elude historians. I also consider tools of restorative justice like truth commissions and similar adjudicatory models traditionally utilized by societies emerging from armed conflict or repressive rule, and ask how they have informed the American initiatives. I explore the tensions and collaborations that result from these borrowings from the global human rights tool kit As director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice project, I work with activists and scholars across the country who are mobilizing legal and community resources around these issues. This work joins the academic with the activist, a chemistry I've yet to get exactly right but continue to shoot for. I'll be pursuing these issues on my sabbatical next year at the Wellesley College Newhouse Center for the Humanities, where I will be a resident fellow. Stay tuned for those paradigm-shifting conclusions.

My current case has always been my most interesting one. I represent a Massachusetts man doing "life without" who recently received a unanimous recommendation for commutation from the Parole Board. Convicted of murder in 1972, the board saw in Arnie King today a wise peacemaker who has much to offer outside the joint. It is now up to Governor Deval Patrick to decide whether to endorse the Parole Board's recommendation. If he does so, it will mark the first commutation for a lifer in 11 years; the freeze on lifer commutations began after the ill-fated release of Willie Horton was used to torpedo the presidential bid of Michael Dukakis.

I am revising the article, "Going Global: Front Politics and the Willie McGee Case." Willie McGee was convicted of rape and executed in Mississippi in 1952 after an unsuccessful international campaign to win his freedom. I examine the famously bitter dispute, initially ignited in the Scottsboro case, between lawyers on the American left and the NAACP over legal and political strategy. In a recently published book chapter, I consider the impact of the European-based campaign to abolish capital punishment on the criminal justice policies of the global South. The chapter is, "The Death Penalty in East Africa: Law, Politics and Transnational Advocacy" in Human Rights NGO in East Africa: Emergent Themes, Challenges & Tensions, ed. Makau Mutua. Although separated by half a century, each of these pieces illustrates the complex interplay of domestic legal advocacy and international politics; my work explores how lawyers in a variety of political cases have deployed global politics to advance domestic rights.

The dead of an unforgiving Boston winter is perhaps an inauspicious time to pick up a book called Snow, but Orhan Pamuk's 2005 novel about a man who finds himself snowed in, figuratively and literally, is haunting and engrossing. Set in a small mountain town in today's Turkey, it elaborates a politics that is at once surreal and too real.

I like to travel solo by train, car or boat (I hate planes). Last summer I took Amtrak half way across the country. I enjoyed the sleeper car, read a lot of novels and met a lot of train people. They're an interesting bunch, although I don't count myself one of them as yet. Dead time is precious time, especially for law people, but I still find I'm more focused on the destination than the ride. Om. I'll get there. Where?

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