Please join us next Wednesday, March 6th, at 11 in the library and one Zoom for Visiting Scholar Benjamin Justice’s presentation, “How Criminal Justice Educates Citizens: Your Day in Court.”
Justice has trifold appointments—as Professor of Educational Theory at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education and as Associate faculty in the history department of Rutgers-New Brunswick, as well as Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He has been at Rutgers since 2002. He holds a PhD in History of Education from Stanford University as well as an MA in American History, and a BA in History from Yale University. His scholarship is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, appearing in journals in education, history, law, social and political science, and philosophy, as well as in mainstream periodicals, radio, and tv. Justice has authored three books, the most recent in 2016 with co-author Colin MacLeod, Have a Little Faith: Religion, Democracy, and the American Public School (University of Chicago Press, 2016). His second book, The Founding Fathers, Education, and “The Great Contest (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) won a Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association in 2014. His other honors include awards for scholarship, teaching, and service, such as the AERA Outstanding Reviewer Award, A National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, the NY State Archives/NY Department of Education/State University of New York Researcher of the Year, and awards in service, teaching, and research from Rutgers University and the Graduate School of Education.
At RSF, Justice is working on a book with co-author Tracey Meares on how experiences with criminal legal institutions shape one’s civic identity. Drawing on scholarship from law, history, and the social sciences, they are examining how legally innocent people encounter three phases of the “curriculum” of American justice: policing, pretrial detention, and adjudication.
