Associate Professor of Law


Professor Eric Miller has dedicated a significant part of his career to researching the impact law has on people's everyday lives. Recently, he has been studying the ways in which criminal law affects urban communities through the War on Drugs and its distinctive manner of policing, as well as unique proposals for reform, such as the development of drug courts that operate to divert addicts from prison and supervise their recovery.

“Understanding the real-world application of criminal law,” he says, “raises important and difficult questions about the values that underlie our system of criminal justice and the roles we expect the police, prosecutor and defense attorney to undertake.”

And it is as both a scholar and a professor that Miller believes there is a great need to question and understand the basic components of this area of law. He urges his students to take active roles in this process, so that they will be able to interpret, on a broader scale, the social and ethical issues presented by criminal law and criminal procedure.

“Among those issues,” says Miller, “are the law's engagement with inequality — particularly race and class-based inequalities. Criminal law provides one ready set of examples in which different communities receive disparate treatment.”

It is for reasons like these that Miller has involved himself in writing about and litigating seeking redress for historically significant race-based acts of violence — acts that he says “show the grim underbelly of American law —when justice was denied to American citizens, and the law and state organizations were used to oppress groups on the basis of race alone.”

Miller notes that many state-sponsored programs lasted well into the 1970s, yet are little known, and feels that “if law is, in some sense, about justice, then we [as students of the law] need to understand and account for the whole picture, and determine our responsibility for accepting or changing the society in which we work.”

As a professor, Miller strives to engage his students, and prefers to create an atmosphere where the topics under discussion are relevant and comprehensible. “A good lawyer is able to understand policy issues and see how they apply in practical situations,” he says. “Doctrine is only part of it. I believe teaching doesn’t begin or end in the classroom. It keeps on going, and I want my students to be ready to follow it.”