Levin College of Law

John F. Stinneford

Edward Rood Eminent Scholar Chair
Professor of Law
Senior Fellow, Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education

About

Professor Stinneford researches, teaches, and consults about legal ethics, criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. His work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court, several state supreme courts and federal courts of appeal, and numerous scholars. It has been published in numerous scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review. The Stanford-Yale Junior faculty forum selected one of his articles as the best paper in the category of Constitutional History, and the AALS Criminal Justice Section named another article as the best paper in its Junior Scholars Paper Competition. In the fall of 2015, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown Law Center, Center for the Constitution.

John Stinneford was the inaugural Director and serves as a Senior Fellow of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. The Hamilton Center is a new academic unit whose mission is to promote civic education and civic discourse and to foster intellectual diversity. Its core purpose is to help students develop the knowledge, habits of thought, analytical skills, and character to be citizens and leaders in a free society. It will do so through curriculum, public programming, and (in conjunction with the Florida Department of Education) teacher training. Its curriculum will focus primarily on the Western intellectual tradition and the American founding.

Before joining the Florida faculty in 2009, Stinneford clerked for the Hon. James Moran of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, served as an Assistant United States Attorney, and practiced law with Winston & Strawn in Chicago. Stinneford teaches first-year courses in Criminal Law and Constitutional Law, and upper-level courses in Professional Responsibility, Criminal Procedure, Federal Criminal Law, Law & Literature, and White Collar Crime.

Education

J.D., Harvard Law School
M.A., Harvard University
B.A., University of Virginia

Teaching and Scholarship

Legal Ethics / Professional Responsibility
Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure
Sentencing
Constitutional Law

Courses

  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Law
  • Professional Responsibility and the Legal Profession

Publications

Articles

  • Is Solitary Confinement a Punishment?, 115 Nw. Univ. L. Rev. 9 (2020) [SSRN]
  • Experimental Punishments​, 95 Notre Dame L. Rev. 39 (2019) [SSRN]
  • The Original Meaning of ‘Cruel’, 105 Geo. L.J. 441 (2017) [SSRN]
  • Dividing Crime, Multiplying Punishments, 48 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1955 (2015) [SSRN]
  • The “Not a Search” Game, 38 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 17 (2014) (invited) [SSRN]
  • Death, Desuetude, and Original Meaning, 56 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 531 (2014) [SSRN]
  • The Illusory Eighth Amendment, 63 Am. U. L. Rev. 437 (2013). [SSRN]
  • Youth Matters: Miller v. Alabama and the Future of Juvenile Sentencing, 11 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. (2013) (invited). [SSRN]
  • Punishment without Culpability, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 653 (2012) (invited). [SSRN]
  • Rethinking Proportionality under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, 97 Va. L. Rev. 899 (2011)(winner, Association of American Law Schools Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholars Call for Papers Competition). [SSRN]
  • Evolving Away from Evolving Standards of Decency, 23 Federal Sentencing Rep.87 (2010). [SSRN]
  • The Original Meaning of ‘Unusual’: The Eighth Amendment as a Bar to Cruel Innovation, 102 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1739 (2008) (chosen for presentation at the 2008 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum; winner, SEALS 2008 Call for Papers competition). [SSRN]
  • Incapacitation through Maiming: Chemical Castration, the Eighth Amendment, and the Denial of Human Dignity, 3 U. St. Thomas L.J. 559 (2006) (symposium). [SSRN]
  • Subsidiarity, Federalism, and Federal Prosecution of Street Crime, 2 J. Cath. Soc. Thought 495 (2005) (symposium) (peer-reviewed). [SSRN]