Criminal Law Scholar Dan Markel Joins Faculty

TALLAHASSEE—Criminal law scholar Dan Markel will join the faculty of the Florida State University College of Law in the fall as an assistant professor. 

Before entering academia, Professor Markel was an associate at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans, & Figel in Washington, D.C., where he practiced white-collar criminal defense and civil litigation in trial and appellate courts. He also has served as a law clerk for the Honorable Judge Michael Daly Hawkins on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

“Dan's writings in criminal law have already commanded national attention, and we are very excited by what he brings to the scholarly mix of our faculty," said Dean Don Weidner. 

Professor Markel’s scholarship is focused on developing a new theory of retributive justice for liberal democracies and applying that theory in particular to topics such as the proper scope of mercy, the death penalty, punitive damages, shaming punishments, and transitional justice in states recovering from mass atrocities. His articles appear in Vanderbilt Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He also has written for or appeared as a commentator in a wide variety of national and international mass media, and is an avid blogger. 

Raised in Toronto, Professor Markel studied politics and philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard University. He then did graduate work in political philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, before returning to Harvard for his law degree, where he was an Olin Fellow and on law review. 

Professor Markel is the fifth new tenure track faculty member to join the law school in the past two years.