معرفی
Donald Braman is an Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and the Director of Science and Policy at the Justice Innovation Lab. He joined the GW Law faculty in 2006 following an Irving S. Ribicoff Fellowship at Yale Law School and served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 2009. At The Lab @ DC, Braman worked as a Senior Social Scientist from 2016 to 2020, helping D.C. agencies leverage data for equitable public safety outcomes.
Education:
- BA, Columbia University
- PhD, Yale University
- JD, Yale University
Professor Braman's scholarship centers on criminal justice reform, evidence-based policymaking, and the application of data science to legal issues. His groundbreaking ethnographic work Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America (2004) examines how mass incarceration contributes to social challenges. More recently, he has pioneered research on corporate accountability for climate-related harms, exploring legal mechanisms to prosecute fossil fuel companies for climate deaths and restructure them as public benefit entities. His work consistently investigates how human cognition influences law and policy, particularly regarding risk perception and cultural identity.
Analysis of Braman's publications reveals a cohesive intellectual trajectory connecting cultural cognition theory with practical legal applications. His early work on criminal justice and family impacts evolved into sophisticated analyses of how cultural identities shape understanding of scientific evidence across domains from gun control to climate change. Recent scholarship demonstrates increasing focus on innovative legal mechanisms to address systemic societal harms, particularly through data-driven criminal justice reform and novel corporate accountability frameworks for climate crisis.
Professor Braman actively contributes to policy development through service on the DC Sentencing and Criminal Code Reform Commission, the DC Criminal Code Reform Commission (as Advisory Member), and the Research Subcommittee for the DC Comprehensive Homicide Elimination Task Force. His work with the Justice Innovation Lab focuses on designing data-driven strategies to reduce inequality within the criminal justice system, demonstrating his commitment to translating academic research into practical policy solutions.
