About Alan Hirsch
I am a professor/ attorney/ writer, educated at Amherst College (B.A. in Philosophy, 1981) and Yale Law School (J.D., 1985). While my work has embraced numerous aspects of both the civil and criminal justice systems, I have increasingly focused my attention on false confessions – studying it, writing about it, and assisting attorneys as a retained expert consultant and/or witness. I’ve been retained in roughly 200 cases, and have been qualified as an expert in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.
I am currently Lecturer in the Humanities at Williams College and chair of Williams’ Justice and Law Studies program. I have also taught constitutional law at Williams and at Bennington College. My other involvement with the law over three decades includes:
- Law Clerk for Judge Edward Becker on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
- Senior Attorney/Writer for the Federal Judicial Center.
- Author of six books and monographs, a dozen scholarly articles in leading law journals, and more than twenty op-eds and magazine articles on various aspects of the legal system, appearing in The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Newsday, among other publications.
Truth About False Confessions 