A former civil rights prosecutor with the Department of Justice will be coming to Marshall to deliver a lecture on justice reform in the last lecture of the Amicus Curiae spring 2025 season.

Jared Fishman, the founder and executive director of the Justice Innovation Lab and former senior prosecutor in the Department of Justice, will be delivering the lecture.

Patricia Proctor, the director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, which sponsors the Amicus Curiae Lecture Series, said Fishman’s experience and desire to help improve the justice system will make him a great candidate to speak.

“He’s very interested in making the world a better place. In fact, he worked at the State Department and went to Kosovo to help rebuild its legal systems in the aftermath of the Kosovo War,” Proctor said. “He was a prosecutor for the civil rights division of the Justice Department for 14 years. In that capacity, he tried some of the most famous cases in recent times, including cases of police brutality.”

Proctor also said Fishman used his experience as a civil rights prosecutor to establish the Justice Innovation Lab, an organization dedicated to developing solutions for problems in the criminal legal system.

“He was recognized as an excellent prosecutor of civil rights,” Proctor said. “He also started something called the Justice Innovation Lab, and the idea behind the Justice Innovation Lab, which should really ring a bell at Marshall, is to use concepts of design thinking based on data to help local jurisdictions improve their practices.”

During his lecture, Proctor said she thinks he will be discussing his “lessons from the justice system,” the origins of the Justice Innovation Lab and how to use its methods to develop solutions for problems facing the local community.

“I think he’s going to talk about all of these things,” she said. “I think he will tell us what brought him to do the Justice Innovation Lab, but also tell some of his stories. I think he will also talk about the methodologies he employs at the Justice Innovation Lab that can be applied to all sorts of issues and problems right here that we want to resolve.”

Montserrat Miller, the executive director of the John Deaver Drinko Academy for American Political Institutions and Civic Culture, said the Amicus Curiae lecture series is essential for enhancing civic literacy.

“To have this lecture series deal with key questions of our constitutional system of government is a tremendous asset to this university and to this community,” Miller said. “The individuals featured all have national reputations and are well-published and very well-respected individuals who are eager to come and participate in this lecture series because of the tremendous reputation it has.”

Ashton Pack can be contacted at [email protected].