George Fletcher | The American Legal System in Comparative Perspective

The Moynihan Institutes’ Law in World Affairs seminar series presents George P. Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence, Columbia University School of Law. 

This lecture examines the American legal system compared to civil law traditions, focusing on its distinctive features such as federalism, adversarial procedure and the jury system. The lecture will also explore how legal education, criminal procedure, and the role of judges and prosecutors differ from other systems. The talk will offer a unique comparative lens better to understand American law’s cultural and institutional foundations.

Fletcher is recognized as one of the foremost scholars in the United States in the fields of comparative and international criminal law, teaching courses that explore the jurisprudence of war, the Bible, crime and victims’ rights. He has written more than 150 law review articles, including the oft-cited Fairness and Utility in Tort Theory. He has also written a Supreme Court amicus brief, for Hamdan v. Rumsfield.

Fletcher’s 20 books include a memoir, a novel and scholarly tomes. They include Tort Liability for Human Rights Abuses, Defending Humanity: When Force Is Justified and Why, and The Grammar of Criminal Law: American, Comparative and International. He has also written dozens of op-ed pieces and longer articles forThe New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books and The Washington Post.

Conversant in seven foreign languages, Fletcher has lectured and conducted media interviews in Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Hungarian and Italian. He is the only scholar writing in English to be cited by the International Criminal Court.