Thomas F. Geraghty
Northwestern University · Pritzker School of Law
Active 1969–2022
About
Thomas F. Geraghty is the Class of 1967 James B. Haddad Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He formerly served as the Associate Dean for Clinical Legal Education and the Director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic, which houses 35 clinical faculty members and enrolls 170 students annually. Professor Geraghty maintains an active caseload at the clinic, focusing primarily on criminal and juvenile defense, death penalty appeals, and child-centered projects involving juvenile court reform and representation of children. His work extends internationally, having collaborated with law students on research projects in Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi related to juvenile justice, street children, children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, women in the legal profession, and freedom of the press. He contributed to designing a clinical curriculum for Addis Ababa University School of Law and completed an assessment of legal education in Ethiopia for ABA/ROLI. Additionally, he is an advisory board member of the Governance and Justice Group, which, with his students, completed the Justice Audit Bangladesh, analyzing the country's criminal justice system. Professor Geraghty is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Economics
- Law
- Operations management
- Pedagogy
- History
- Archaeology
- Philosophy
- Accounting
- Epistemology
- Medicine
- Physics
- Economic growth
- Business
- Mathematics education
- Psychology
Selected publications
CrimRxiv · 2022 · 5 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Courtrooms operate as unique microcosms—inhabited by courtroom personnel, legal actors, defendants, witnesses, family members, and community residents who necessarily interact with each other to conduct the day-to-day functions of justice. This Article argues that these interactions create a nuanced and salient courtroom culture that separates courtroom insiders from courtroom outsiders. The authors use the Cook County courts, specifically the George N. Leighton Courthouse at 2650 S California Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, to investigate courtroom culture and construct a thematic portrait of one of the largest criminal court systems in the United States. Using this newly constructed data source of rich ethnographic observations, this Article draws out a series of themes that illuminate two types of failures that characterize courtroom culture in Cook County: micro-level failures and structural-level failures. While micro-level failures may fall into the category of “mistakes,” when aggregated they impede the effective functioning of the criminal legal system. Structural-level failures, by contrast, threaten the fair and efficient operation of courts even in the absence of individual errors. This Article uses examples of real court interactions gathered through observational research to illustrate both categories of failures in the Cook County criminal courts. This Article then situates these observations in the context of legal cynicism theory to explain the impact of courtroom culture on those most directly impacted by the system. This Article concludes with recommendations for courtroom culture reform, looking for positive examples in our data and considering new possibilities for courts in the era of COVID-19.
Introduction to Symposium, "Human Rights and Access to Justice in Ethiopia"
eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingPlanning and changing · 2021 · 1 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Mathematics education
- Political Science
Wage strikes in 1880s America: A test of the war of attrition model
Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2021-07-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingBy relating strike outcomes and durations to the value of the disputed wage change and to the cost to each side of continuing the strike, this paper tests the hypothesis that the war of attrition with asymmetric information model of strikes accurately describes the characteristics of strikes over wages in the United States in the early to middle part of the 1880s. That hypothesis is not rejected by linear, probit, or nonparametric kernel estimation. Specifically, variables that decrease a side’s cost of striking or increase its opponent’s cost are shown to increase its maximum holdout time, and vice versa, and strike duration increases with the value of the prize in dispute and with uncertainty about the outcome. Alternative game theoretic models of strikes – signaling and screening models, and models with ongoing negotiations – do not fit the data as well. We also explore why the strikes took the form of wars of attrition, and why later strikes did not. Our results have implications for modern union behavior in the face of globalization.
eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-12-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingthe core of clinical work is existential-it's about going through a different experience, with the client, shoulder to shoulder, and having some of that experience stay with each student, no matter what career path she or he eventually follows.These types of experiences provide future advocates the chance to examine a side of our justice system they might otherwise never see.That makes them better lawyers and better people." 1
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020
- Political Science
- Accounting
- Business
2020-01-01
reportOpen accessThe National Board for Professional Teaching Standards recognizes teachers who meet performance standards for "accomplished" educators. States and districts provide support for teachers to obtain this certification, which is considered an honor in the field. Using high school data from Chicago and Kentucky, we examine whether participation in the time- and resource-intensive certification process improves teacher productivity and, ultimately, if recognized teachers are of higher quality than their non-certified peers. We find the certification process itself did not increase teacher productivity. Further, we find mixed evidence on whether certified teachers are more effective at raising test scores than non-certified teachers.
White Paper of Democratic Criminal Justice
Stirling Online Research Repository (University of Stirling) · 2017-08-01 · 12 citations
articleOpen accessThis white paper is the joint product of nineteen professors of criminal law and procedure who share a common conviction: that the path toward a more just, effective, and reasonable criminal system in the United States is todemocratizeAmerican criminal justice. In the name of the movement to democratize criminal justice, we herein set forth thirty proposals for democratic criminal justice reform.
eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2012-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingNorthwestern journal of law and social policy · 2011-01-01
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Robert P. Burns
Northwestern University
- 3 shared
Michael Huberman
Université de Montréal
- 3 shared
Kenworthey Bilz
- 3 shared
Laura I Appleman
College of Law
- 2 shared
Ekow N. Yankah
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 2 shared
Tom R. Tyler
- 2 shared
Richard A. Bierschbach
- 2 shared
Anthony O’Rourke
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