Leigh B. Bienen

Currently, she has launched (December 2008) a website, The Life and Times of Florence Kelley in Chicago, 1890-1899, which is a repository for 35,000 legal and historical records and photographs (Florence Kelley.northwestern.edu). This interdisciplinary research and archival project has been supported by Sidley Austin, LLP, the Northwestern University School of Law Faculty Research Funds, and other grants. She is a member of the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee and the Director of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project. This Project involved the analysis and exegesis of a hand written data set kept by the Chicago Police of more than 11,000 homicides in Chicago from 1870-1930. The original data set along with contextual and archival materials is available on an interactive web site, Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930 (homicide.northwestern.edu). This Project has been generously supported by grants from The Joyce Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, The McCormick Tribune Foundation and Northwestern University School of Law.

Recent publications include: “Capital Punishment in Illinois the Aftermath of The Ryan Commutations: Reforms, Economic Realities, and a New Saliency for Issues of Cost,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 100, No. 4 (2010); “Anomalies: Ritual and Language in Lethal Injection Regulations” Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 35, Issue No. 4, June 2008; “Not Wiser After 35 Years of Contemplating the Death Penalty” Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Volume 42, 2008 “The Record Keepers,” TriQuarterly, No. 124 (2006); “Learning From the Past, Living in the Present,” (with Brandon Rottinghaus) Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 92, No’s 3 and 4 (2002); Crimes of the Century, [with Gilbert Geis] (Northeastern University Press, 1998); “The Quality of Justice in Capital Cases: Illinois as a Case Study,” Law and Contemporary Problems (Duke University School of Law) Vol. 61, No. 4 (1998); “Defining Incest,” Northwestern University Law Review, “The Proportionality Review of Capital Cases by State High Courts after Gregg: Only the Appearance of Justice?” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 87, No. 1 (1996).

She directed an empirical study of all homicide cases in New Jersey after the reimposition of capital punishment in New Jersey and drafted the model sex offense statute which was the basis for rape reform legislation in a number of states and enacted in New Jersey in 1979. Other publications include: “Rape III, Recent Developments in Rape Reform Legislation” Women’s Rights Law Reporter (1981); Jurors and Rape [with H. Field] (Lexington Press, D.C. Heath & Co.,1980); “Mistakes” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1978); L. Bienen, N. Weiner, D. Denno, P. Allision and D. Mills, “The Reimposition of Capital Punishment in New Jersey: The Role of Prosecutorial Discretion,” 41 Rutgers L. Review 27 (1988) and L. Bienen, N. Weiner, P. Allison, and D. Mills, “The Reimposition of Capital Punishment in New Jersey: Felony Murder Cases,” 54 Albany L. Review 709 (1990) and other articles on homicide, capital punishment, and rape.

A graduate of Cornell University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Rutgers-Newark School of Law, she has worked as a journalist and an editor and published fiction and essays in TriQuarterly, The Ontario Review, Transition, and The O’Henry Prize Stories. A short play of hers was included in Winters’ Tales 1994, McCarter Theatre’s New Play Festival. In 2001 her first book length collection of fiction, The Left Handed Marriage, was published by Ontario Review Press, Princeton, New Jersey.