Professor David Siegel is Director of New England Law's Center for Law and Social Responsibility.
Professor Siegel has written articles on the history of mental health defenses in criminal law, the ethical obligations of criminal defense lawyers and prosecutors, and involuntary medication of criminal defendants. He is a founding member of the New England Innocence Project and serves on its Case Review Committee. He also directs the Criminal Justice Project.
He received a Fulbright senior specialist grant to teach at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, for six weeks in 2009. While there, he taught an advanced seminar on comparative criminal procedure and lectured on “Task Setting in Police Management for Performance” at Southwest Jaiotong University in Chengdu. Professor Siegel also lectured on “Eyewitness Misidentification: Social Science Informing Law Enforcement Reform” at Southwest University of Finance and Economics at Chengdu and on “The American Death Penalty in the 21st Century” at the US Consulate in Chengdu. He conducted a workshop on sentencing, which was presented for judges from the Sichuan High Court. Before joining the New England Law faculty in 1996, he was a senior assistant public defender for the Office of the Metropolitan Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee. He served as a clerk for the Honorable E. Grady Jolly, Jr., of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Since 2015 he has also served as co-chair for the Boston Bar Association Amicus Committee.
Professor Siegel has authored amicus briefs addressing issues of fairness and accuracy in the criminal legal system. He also shares his insights via The Continuing Duty blog (with Professor Tigran Eldred), which is devoted to “...ensuring that lawyers constitutionally and ethically act as the very best lawyers they can be, before, during, and after their representation has ended.”