Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College and from Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Black Law Students Association and as a general editor of the *Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal*. Those student roles preceded a career combining legal practice, public defense and university teaching.

In 1994, he worked with the Law Society of Kenya on a committee drafting a proposed constitution and with the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. He later directed the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and practiced white-collar criminal defense in Washington firms. Before joining Harvard, he taught at Yale Law School and received its award for outstanding teaching after his first year.

Sullivan joined Harvard's faculty in 2007. The school currently lists him as Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law, faculty director of the Trial Advocacy Workshop and faculty director emeritus of the Criminal Justice Institute.

His practice has included some of the most closely watched cases in the country. He secured an acquittal in the double-murder case of former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez, five not-guilty verdicts in a securities-fraud case in New York, and a wrongful-death settlement with the city of Ferguson for the family of Michael Brown. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed court records in New Orleans in 2005, he designed an indigent-defense system that helped address the incarceration of people left without counsel. In 2008, he chaired the criminal-justice advisory committee for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

In 2014, Brooklyn district attorney Ken Thompson asked Sullivan to design and implement a Conviction Review Unit. Harvard describes the unit's purpose as identifying wrongful convictions and supporting exoneration. Sullivan subsequently advised prosecutors' offices across the country on conviction-integrity programs.

Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, became Winthrop House's residential leaders in 2009, the first African Americans to hold such posts at Harvard.