Dubber, Markus Dirk

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DUBBER, Markus Dirk

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1988; Stanford University, J.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York, 712 O'Brian Hall, North Campus, Buffalo, NY 14260-1100. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Chambers of Gerald B. Tjoflat, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, Jacksonville, FL, judicial clerk, 1991-92; University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL, Bigelow teaching fellow and lecturer in law, 1992-93; State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law, associate professor, 1993-99, professor of law, 1999—.

Buffalo Criminal Law Review, editor, 1996—; University of Michigan Law School, visiting professor, 2001; Law and History Review, board of editors, 2001—; Association of American Law Schools, chair of Comparative Law Section, 2001-02; Buffalo Criminal Law Center, director, 1996—.

MEMBER:

American Law Institute, American Society for Legal History.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction fellowship, 2000; Humboldt research fellowship, University of Munich, Institute of Legal Philosophy, 2000-01, 2003, 2004; Sustained Achievement Award, Exceptional Scholar Program, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2004.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Bernd Schunemann) Die Stellung des Opfers im Strafrechtssystem: Neue Entwicklungen im deutschen und amerikanischen Recht, Carl Heymanns (Cologne, Germany), 2000.

Criminal Law: Model Penal Code, Foundation Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Einfuhrung in das US-amerikanische Strafrecht, C.H. Beck (Munich, Germany), 2004.

(With Mark Kelman) American Criminal Law: Cases, Statutes, and Comments, Foundation Press (New York, NY), 2005.

The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Also author of numerous articles, essays, and book reviews for periodicals.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A critical introduction to German criminal law; a study of the New York penal code; a philosophical work on the power of empathy in law.

SIDELIGHTS:

Markus Dirk Dubber, whose studies have taken historic, philosophical, and comparative approaches to criminal law and procedure, has written on such topics as capital punishment, criminal law reform, the jury, plea bargaining, and German criminal law. In Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights, Dubber discusses how the American victims' rights movement has, in his opinion, been distorted by the development of the so-called "war on crime." The war on crime, Dubber argues, has shifted its focus towards criminal offenses that have no victims, especially possession offenses. This shift, in many cases, reduces the crime victim to a mere means for the state to exercise its right to punish. It also redefines the notion of state so that the state, under the disguise of victims' rights, can exercise social control over individuals, erode constitutional rights, and become a police state. Dubber further pursues this theme in The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, an exploration of the constitutional and legal history behind the power of the modern state to police its citizens.

Leo Zaibert, a critic for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote that "Dubber sensibly reminds us that victims are first and foremost persons, and … that personhood should be the cornerstone of the criminal law of a state which respects the humanity of its citizens." K. Baird-Olson, reviewing Victims in the War on Crime for Choice, also found that Dubber "successfully critiques federal and state administrative (prosecutorial) misuse of the War on Crime." Baird-Olson felt, however, that the second part of the book "suffers from an incomplete review of victim restitution programs." Robert Elais, reviewing the book for Buffalo Law Review, concluded that Dubber "succeeds admirably" in his task of arguing for a change in how American criminal law deals with crime victims.