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Donahue Lecture Series 2017-2018

The Suffolk University Law Review is honored to announce the 2017-18 Donahue Lecture Series featuring David McCraw, Hon. Michael Ricciuti, and Joanna Schwartz.  The series promises scholarship and anecdotes from these litigators and thought leaders on the topics of freedom of the press in the age President Trump and Twitter, criminal discovery, and the Supreme Court’s view on litigation. Please read more about the lecturer’s noteworthy and varied careers below.

The 115th Lecture with David McCraw – November 2, 2017
The 116th Lecture with Hon. Michael Ricciuti – February 22, 2018
The 117th Lecture with Joanna Schwartz – April 5, 2018

Each lecture begins at 4:00 P.M. at the Suffolk University Law School120 Tremont StreetBoston, MA. Reception to immediately follow each lecture.
The Suffolk University Law Review Donahue Lecture Series is open to the public.  Suffolk University Law students are encouraged to attend. 


David McCraw, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of The New York Times

Did the First Amendment Go and Get Old?  Press Freedom in the Age of Trump and Twitter

Thursday, November 2, 2017
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont StreetBoston, MA

David McCraw, Deputy General Counsel of The New York Times, was described last year by one veteran reporter in an online forum as “the lawyer every journalist dreams of having.”

Mr. McCraw has spent the last 15 years at The Times, where he serves as the newspaper’s top newsroom lawyer.  He has been the lawyer behind virtually every major investigative story The Times has done in recent years, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning stories on workers’ deaths at a Texas foundry, the lethal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at a New Orleans hospital, and the secret fortunes of China’s political elite.

In October, a letter Mr. McCraw wrote to Donald Trump’s lawyer defending the paper’s right to publish a story about two women who claimed to have been groped by Mr. Trump became one of the lasting artifacts of the presidential campaign.  More than two million people read the letter on The Times website.  Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote, “Of all the sentences written about Trump over many, many months now, my favorite is the last in the letter sent by David McCraw.”

Mr. McCraw is among the nation’s most prolific litigators of freedom-of-information cases.  He has litigated more than 40 FOIA suits, winning the disclosure of secret documents on topics ranging from drone strikes in Yemen and terrorist investigations in the U.S. to the government’s burgeoning surveillance program after 9/11. Mr. McCraw also heads up The Times’s crisis management team coordinating the paper’s response when journalists are kidnapped or detained overseas.

Mr. McCraw is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School. He is an adjunct professor at the NYU Law School.  In 2010, the New York City Bar awarded Mr. McCraw its Cyrus Vance Award for his international pro bono work on behalf of free expression. His pro bono work on behalf of government transparency and press freedom has included projects in Yemen, Montenegro, Bahrain, and Kuwait and workshops for lawyers and journalists in South America, China, Russia, and Eastern Europe.


Honorable Michael D. Ricciuti, Massachusetts Superior Court Justice

Exploring Criminal Discovery

Thursday, February 22, 2018
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont StreetBoston, MA

The Honorable Michael Ricciuti is a Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court.  Prior to beginning his judicial career, Judge Ricciuti practiced in both the private and public sector, including as a Partner at K&L Gates, an Assistant United States Attorney at the United States Attorney’s Office in Boston, and as a trial attorney with the Employment Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in Washington, DC.  He also previously served as Judicial Clerk for the Honorable A. David Mazzone of the United States District Court in Massachusetts.  He completed his Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1987 and A.B. from Harvard College.  Judge Ricciuti is also a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Suffolk University Law School, where he has taught Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure, a three-credit upper-level criminal course on constitutional law and criminal process, for ten years. 

Joanna Schwartz, Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law

Systems Failures in Policing

Thursday, April 5, 2018
4:00 P.M.
Suffolk University Law School
120 Tremont StreetBoston, MA

Joanna Schwartz is Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure, the Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. In 2015, she received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Schwartz is one of the country’s leading experts on police misconduct litigation. Her studies examine the frequency with which police departments gather and analyze information from lawsuits, and the ways in which litigation-attentive departments use lawsuit data to reduce the likelihood of future harms. She has also examined the financial effects of police misconduct litigation, including the frequency with which police officers contribute to settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases, and the extent to which police department budgets are affected by litigation costs. Professor Schwartz has also looked more broadly at how lawsuits influence decision-making in hospitals, airlines, and other organizational settings.

Professor Schwartz additionally studies the dynamics of modern civil litigation. Recent scholarship examines the degree to which litigation costs and delays necessitate current civil procedure rules, and compares rhetoric with available evidence about the costs and burdens of class action litigation. She is co-author, with Stephen Yeazell, of a leading casebook, Civil Procedure (9th Edition).

Professor Schwartz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School. She was awarded the Francis Wayland Prize for her work in Yale Law School’s Prison Legal Services clinic. After law school, Professor Schwartz clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York and Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was then associated with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP, in New York City, where she specialized in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, and First Amendment litigation. She was awarded the New York City Legal Aid Society’s Pro Bono Publico Award for her work as co-counsel representing a class of inmates challenging conditions at Rikers Island. Immediately prior to her appointment, Professor Schwartz was the Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law.