A large part of what brought me to California was its prisons. As a lifelong East Coaster, I had a hard time fathoming the anomaly of Golden State incarceration. How could it be that such a progressive state clung to the harshest “three strikes” law in the nation? How could one state’s prison population rival the population of all the federal prisons combined?
Articles in ‘Criminal Justice’
Understanding the Power of Prosecution
November 8, 2010 | Issue 83Michael A. Hestrin remembers vividly his first day in court. It was 1996, and he was part of the first group of students to take the Criminal Prosecution Clinic. He was assigned an evidence hearing and spent hours researching—then the moment he’d been anticipating came. “I stood up and addressed the judge, and I just knew. It felt absolutely right. It was transformational for me,” says Hestrin ’97 (MA ’97).
On International Cooperation and Security
November 8, 2010 | Issue 83The son of a German mother and an African-American father, he was raised in a working-class suburb of New Jersey—often spending weekends and evenings helping his father with the family’s office cleaning company. A bright student, he was encouraged by his parents to pursue higher education and he excelled at Stanford Law School. He was elected Law Association president following his 1L year, became a notes editor for Stanford Law Review …