As a lawyer, Harcourt has represented inmates on death and those serving life imprisonment without parole. His most notable clients include Walter McMillian, and Doyle Lee Hamm, whose 2018 execution was called off because an IV line could not be set. Harcourt is also an academic. He was appointed the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology at University of Chicago in 2003 and elected chairman of the Department of Political Science in 2010. In 2013, he became a chaired professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Since 2014, he has been the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University.
Works
Harcourt's writings focus on punishment, social control, legal and political theory, and political economy from a critical, empirical, and social theoretic perspective. In 2012, he published, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order which explored the relationship between laissez faire and mass incarceration. In Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing he challenged evidence for the broken windows theory and critiqued the assumptions of the policing strategy. In Language of the Gun, he develops a post-structuralist theory of social science, arguing that social scientists should embrace the ethical choices they make when they interpret data. He has also edited works by Michel Foucault in French and English. He is the editor of the French edition of Foucault's 1972 Collège de France lectures on Théories et institutions pénales and Foucault's 1973 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive. He is the co-editor, with Fabienne Brion, of Foucault's 1981 Louvain lectures Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l'aveu en justice. In 2016, he published Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, which explores how digital practices have transformed the circulation of power in contemporary society and produced what he refers to as a new "expository society". Exposed was translated into French as La Société d'exposition and reviewed in Le Monde and Le Figaro. In 2018, he published The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens.
Awards and honors
In 2015, Harcourt was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Aix-Marseille University in France for his contributions to contemporary critical thought. He is also the recipient of the 2009 Gordon J. Laing Prize for his 2007 book, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in the Actuarial Age. In 2019, Harcourt received from the New York City Bar Association the Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award for his longtime advocacy on behalf of individuals on death row.
