Marquette Law School Barrock Lecture to discuss 'localism' in the context of criminal law and enforcement, Nov. 13

Nov. 11, 2025

MILWAUKEE - Ronald Wright, Needham Yancey Gulley Professor of Criminal Law at Wake Forest University, will deliver Marquette University Law School's Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law, titled "The Place(s) for Localism in Criminal Law and Enforcement," on Thursday, Nov. 13, at Eckstein Hall.

This lecture will survey topics, times, and places when localism influences criminal law and enforcement. Then it will evaluate the scene, noting the levels of government best positioned to shape the variations with an eye to delivering public safety and legitimacy.

Registration is available online. Media interested in attending must contact Kevin Conway at [email protected] in advance.

Actors at different levels of government-national, state, and local-shape the criminal law. The result is a fragmented landscape, with some practices being the same everywhere and others showing great variety from place to place. Consider, for example, constitutional search warrant requirements, which apply uniformly to police working in very different urban and rural contexts, and, by contrast, the ability of local prosecutors to select charges that look completely different from the charges preferred by prosecutors in another district in similar cases. For many observers, fragmentation is troubling-a source of inconsistency, even hidden defiance of shared values. Others welcome the local variety as a source of creative experimentation and needed flexibility in a pluralistic society.

Wright is one of the nation's leading scholars of criminal justice. He is the coauthor of two casebooks in criminal procedure and sentencing, and his empirical research concentrates on the work of criminal prosecutors. He is a board member of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution (based at John Jay College of Criminal Justice) and has been an advisor or board member for Families Against Mandatory Minimum Sentences (FAMM), North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, Inc., and the Winston-Salem Citizens' Police Review Board. He previously was a white-collar prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice and is a graduate of Yale Law School.

The Barrock Lecture is supported by a bequest of the late Mary Barrock Bonfield to honor her parents, George and Margaret Barrock. George Barrock was a 1931 graduate of Marquette Law School.

Through public programming such as the Marquette Law School Poll, "On the Issues" conversations with newsmakers, public lectures by leading scholars, conferences on issues of public significance, and the work of its Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, Marquette Law School serves as an important venue in this region for civil discourse about law and public policy matters.

About Kevin Conway

Kevin is the associate director for university communication in the Office of Marketing and Communication. Contact Kevin at (414) 288-4745 or [email protected].