The SDOC Honors Program and the New England Law Review are excited to welcome Professor Mark Osler who will discuss his article, The First Step Act and the Brutal Timidity of Criminal Law Reform, which was featured in Volume 54-2 of the New England Law Review.

Mark Osler is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas (MN). He also holds the Ruthie Mattox Preaching Chair at First Covenant Church, Minneapolis. Osler's writing on clemency, sentencing and narcotics policy has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic and in law journals at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Georgetown, Ohio State, UNC, William and Mary, and Rutgers.

A former federal prosecutor, he later won the case of Spears v. United States in the U.S. Supreme Court, with the Court ruling that judges could categorically reject a mandatory 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine in the federal sentencing guidelines.

In 2020, Osler served as chair of the independent panel which reviewed the case of Myon Burrell and recommended that Burrell receive a commutation of sentence. Osler is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and Yale Law School.