Mugambi Jouet to join the Faculty as Boulton Fellow in 2018 and Assistant Professor in 2019

The Faculty of Law is pleased to announce that Mugambi Jouet will be joining the Faculty as Boulton Fellow, starting on August 1, 2018, before being appointed Assistant Professor on August 1, 2019.

Mugambi Jouet’s research focuses on criminal justice and comparative law from a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing history, sociology, and political science. He is the author of Exceptional America: What Divides Americans From the World and From Each Other (University of California Press, 2017), a comprehensive book on the relationship between American exceptionalism and the intense polarization of modern America compared to other Western democracies: European nations, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. His multiple scholarly articles have notably explored the roots of legal and cultural attitudes toward crime, incarceration, and the death penalty.

Mugambi Jouet was a Thomas C. Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School from 2015 to 2018. He is currently completing his PhD at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He further holds a JD, cum laude, from Northwestern University, a Master’s degree in Public Policy from New York University, and a BA in History from Rice University.

He previously practiced as an appellate public defender in Manhattan, representing numerous indigent persons, from homicide cases to the “War on Drugs.”  He also served as a judicial clerk at the U.N. war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, and assistant clinical law instructor at Sciences Po in Paris. He has traveled widely internationally and is trilingual in English, French, and Spanish.

“Mugambi Jouet’s experience as a defense attorney and his fascinating comparative work on approaches to punishment will enrich our research and teaching in criminal law and more broadly,” said Dean Robert Leckey. “Having authored a book for a general readership and made many appearances in the media, he brings an unusually developed capacity to share his knowledge and ideas outside the research community.”