Biography

Dennis Curtis is Professor of Law Emeritus at the Yale Law School, where he teaches courses on sentencing and professional responsibility. He also directs a clinical course in which students work with Connecticut’s State Disciplinary Counsel to prosecute lawyers who violate rules of professional conduct.

Professor Curtis was one of the  pioneers of clinical education in the 1970s. In the programs that he has created, faculty supervise students who represent indigent clients in a variety of contexts. Some of the clients are in settings such as prisons and mental hospitals. By working within institutions, students learn an area of substantive law in an administrative-regulatory context. For example, students at Yale represented federal inmates at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, and patients at Connecticut Valley mental hospital. At U.S.C., students assisted federal inmates at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution and state inmates at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, California. In addition, students at both schools were active in a variety of legal service programs on behalf of aliens, the elderly, the homeless, the developmentally disabled, and clients of legal aid societies.

In both programs, students represented clients in legal settings ranging from negotiations and administrative hearings to appellate arguments in the federal circuit courts. Students often engaged in research that resulted in law review articles and monographs -- illustrating the relationship between becoming lawyers and understanding substantive legal regimes.

In 1997, Professor Curtis developed a new clinical offering in which students appeared in hearings before the Statewide Grievance Committee, the agency charged with administering the lawyer disciplinary process in Connecticut. Under this model, students functioned to prosecute cases alleging violations of Connecticut’s Code of Professional Responsibility. Hearings are formal proceedings in which students conduct direct and cross examination of witnesses and of respondent lawyers and present closing arguments, as well as prepare briefs and conduct interviews. In addition, students negotiate to work out dispositions short of trial. 

Professor Curtis has written several essays on clinical education and the legal profession, including: Educating Lawyers: Clinical Programs and the Legal Profession, Keynote Address at World Clinical Conference, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, September 8, 2006 (published as translated into Japanese in 2007); Teaching Billing: Metrics of Value in Law Firms and Law Schools (with Judith Resnik), 54 Stanford Law Review 1409 (2002); Grieving Criminal Defense Lawyers (with Judith Resnik), 70 Fordham Law Review 1615 (2002); Can Law Schools and Big Law Firms Be Friends? 74 Southern California Law Review 65(2000); Individuals within the Aggregate: Relationships, Representation and Fees (with Judith Resnik and Deborah R. Hensler), 71 New York University Law Review 296 (1996), and Old Knights and New Champions: Kaye, Scholer, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Pursuit of the Dollar, 66 Southern California Law Review 985 (1993).

Since the late 1990s, Professor Curtis has joined sitting federal judges and other law professors in shaping courses on the law of sentencing. Currently, along with the Honorable Nancy Gertner and Professor Kate Stith, the sentencing class at Yale Law School focuses on sentencing guidelines in the United States as well as methods of sentencing in states and in countries around the world. Professor Curtis’s writings in the area of post-conviction justice include Mistretta and Metaphor, 66 Southern California Law Review 607 (1992); The Reform of Federal Sentencing and Parole Laws, National Prison Project Journal, Fall 1987, and the book Toward a Just and Effective Sentencing System: Agenda for Legislative Reform (with Pierce O’Donnell and Michael Churgin) (Praeger 1979).
 
Professor Curtis is also working on a project (with Professor Judith Resnik) on the relationship between adjudication and democracy. That inquiry is tracing the evolution of courts over centuries, and published essays related to this project include Images of Justice 96 Yale Law Journal 1727 (1987); From “Rites” to “Rights” of Audience: The Utilities and Contingencies of the Public’s Role in Court-Based Processes in Representations of Justice 195-236 (eds. Antoine Masson and Kevin O’Connor, P.I.E.- Peter Lang, 2007), and Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses, Henry la Barre Jayne Lecture, in 151 Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139 (2007) .

He has testified before congressional and judicial committees on sentencing, parole, and post-conviction remedies. From 1990 to 1995, he served as the first President of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, created when the voters in Los Angeles approved a change in the City Charter. The jurisdiction of the Ethics Commission included campaign finance laws and regulations and governmental ethics, and the Commission distributed millions of dollars in matching campaign funds to eligible candidates for city elections.

In 2007, Professor Curtis was appointed to serve on the Democracy Fund Board, which is the government entity in New Haven charged with distributing public funds for campaigns. He is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as a consultant for law schools through the Association of American Law Schools. He also chaired the AALS’s Committee on Clinical Legal Education and served as a director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.