Nationality American | ||
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Full Name Brent Evan Newton Occupation Deputy Staff Director at United States Sentencing CommissionProfessor of Law Website Georgetown Law Biography Residence Washington, D.C., United States Education University of North Carolina System (Bachelor of Arts), Columbia Law School (Juris Doctor) | ||
Brent Evan Newton is an American legal scholar, the deputy staff director at the United States Sentencing Commission, and a professor of law. Newton is an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University Law Center and Washington College of Law at American University and also works as an adjunct professor of political science and criminal justice at the University of Maryland.
Contents
- American legal education
- Death penalty
- Law review articles
- Contributions to law reviews
- Contributions to legal journals
- References
Newton graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and a Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review. After graduating from law school in 1992, he clerked for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. After his clerkship, Newton worked as a public defender in both the state and federal systems. In that role, Newton also represented death row inmates in the American South.
Newton has argued before the United States Supreme Court. In 2008, Newton argued Gonzalez v. United States. In 2010, Newton was elected as a member of the American Law Institute.
American legal education
In "Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy," Newton criticizes the legal academy's reliance upon law review articles for tenure consideration, rather than preparing students to practice law.
Death penalty
Newton has written about the death penalty with particular emphasis on the Texas system in which he practiced for many years. In “Capital Punishment: Texas Could Learn a Lot from Florida" (1998), Newton surmised that Texas’s high actual execution numbers could be attributed to three factors at that time: the way judges were elected, a weak public defender system, and a flawed jury system that didn’t allow for the consideration of mitigating evidence.
Law review articles
Newton wrote for SCOTUSblog on the value of law review articles for United States Supreme Court justices. According to Newton, about half of all Supreme Court opinions cited at least one law review article in the 1970s and 1980s. Since 2000, however, the rate is" just 37 percent — even as Supreme Court opinions have grown longer and more elaborate."