Adam Kolber

Biography

Professor Kolber writes and teaches in the areas of criminal law, jurisprudence, bioethics, and neurolaw. In 2005, he created the Neuroethics & Law Blog and, in 2006, taught the first law school course devoted to law and neuroscience. As part of a MacArthur Foundation grant, he has also taught law and neuroscience topics to federal and state judges. Professor Kolber has been a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and at NYU Law School's Center for Research in Crime and Justice. His work has been frequently discussed in the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Professor Kolber began his academic career on the faculty of the University of San Diego School of Law. Before that, he clerked for the Honorable Chester J. Straub of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. Professor Kolber received his A.B. from Princeton University and graduated Order of the Coif from Stanford Law School, where he was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. Prior to law school, he was a business ethics consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Professor Kolber's book, Punishment for the Greater Good, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The book provides a limited consequentialist defense of punishment. Among his other publications, he has written “The Bumpiness of Criminal Law,” 67 Alabama Law Review 855 (2016); “Will There Be a Neurolaw Revolution?” 89 Indiana Law Journal 807 (2014); "Against Proportional Punishment," 66 Vanderbilt Law Review 1141 (2013), "Unintentional Punishment," 18 Legal Theory 1 (2012); “The Experiential Future of the Law,” 60 Emory Law Journal 585 (2011); “The Subjective Experience of Punishment,” 109 Columbia Law Review 182 (2009), and "Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening," 59 Vanderbilt Law Review 1561 (2006).