Biography
Professor Braatz studies punishment in the United States and abroad. She is interested in how and why we punish people the way that we do as well as how this might change in the future. Her current work examines the administrative context of prisons and the application of numerous administrative law concepts in that context including transparency and expertise. She also examines the history and application of the Eighth Amendment in this context. Her dissertation, Governing Difference: Penal Policy and State Building on the Gold Coast, 1844-1957, examines British criminal law and penal regimes in colonial West Africa and connects these practices to broader debates concerning governance and the global circulation of imprisonment as a technique of punishment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Professor Braatz has a JD and PhD in Law & Society from New York University. She previously held a Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at NYU and completed clerkships with Judge Richard Stearns of the Eastern District of Massachusetts and Judge Juan Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Prior to clerking she worked as an associate at Sidley Austin in New York City.
Education
Publications
Articles
Edited Volume
Special Issue: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective, 24(5) PUNISHMENT & SOC’Y 759 (2022) (with Katherine Bruce-Lockhard and Stacey Hynd)
Book Review
Erin Braatz, Book Review: Michael Lobban, Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa, 40 L. & HIST. REV. 867 (2022).
