Rob Warden
Executive Director Rob Warden is an award winning legal affairs journalist who, as editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer magazine during the 1980's exposed more than a score of wrongful convictions in Illinois, including cases in which six innocent men had been sentenced to death.
Before founding Chicago Lawyer in 1978, Mr. Warden was an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at the Chicago Daily News. In 1989, Mr. Warden sold Chicago Lawyer to the Law Bulletin Publishing Company, which has continued to publish it. After that, before co-founding the Center on Wrongful Convictions with Professor Lawrence C. Marshall in 1999, he worked as a political issues consultant, executive officer of the Cook County State’s Attorney's Office, and consultant to various law firms and the litigation department of General Electric Medical Systems.
He has won more than fifty journalism awards, including the Medill School of Journalism’s John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, two American Civil Liberties Union James McGuire Awards, five Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Norval Morris Award from the Illinois Academy of Criminology. In 2003, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.
