Robert Blecker is an Emeritus Professor at New York Law School, where he taught criminal law and Constitutional history. He is the author of ‘The Death of Punishment’, which grew out of the hundreds of hours of interviews he did with death-row inmates at some of the nation’s most notorious prisons. (That research also led to him being the subject of the feature film ‘Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead’, as well as the star of the recent Amazon documentary ‘Four Games in Fall’—about Deflategate and Tom Brady.) Blecker’s play about the ratification of the Constitution, titled ‘Vote No’, opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and is headed back to New York for its Off-Broadway opening. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Blecker started out his career as a Special Prosecutor in New York, which is the context for the initial part of our conversation.

Julia Davis is administrative law judge at New York City’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Prior to recently assuming this position, she was the Director of Research and Investigations in the NYC Comp- troller’s Office, was Inspector General in the New York City Department of Investigation, and held senior positions in the NYC Conflicts of Interest Board and Business Integrity Commission. Following her graduation from Smith College and the American University Washing- ton College of Law, she became an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn.

Originally published in New York Law Journal - 2022.