Dennis E. Curtis

Dennis Curtis is Clinical Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School, where he developed with judges a course on sentencing, taught professional responsibility, and pioneered clinical education.

In the 1970s, he created a clinic in which faculty-supervised students worked with indigent clients to gain insights into the substantive law; illustrative was work by Yale Law students, who represented people incarcerated at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution. At U.S.C., where he taught from 1981 to 1996, students assisted federal prisoners at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution and state prisoners at the California Institute for Women at Frontera, California. In 1997, returning to Yale Law School, Professor Curtis developed a new clinical offering with the Connecticut agency charged with administering the lawyer disciplinary process. 

Professor Curtis’s books include Toward a Just and Effective Sentencing System: Agenda for Legislative Reform (with Pierce O’Donnell and Michael Churgin, Praeger 1979) and Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (with Judith Resnik, Yale University Press, 2011). His essays include Educating Lawyers: Clinical Programs and the Legal Profession, Keynote Address at World Clinical Conference, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, September 8, 2006 (published as translated into Japanese in 2007); Grieving Criminal Defense Lawyers (with Judith Resnik), 70 Fordham Law Review 1615 (2002); and Mistretta and Metaphor, 66 Southern California Law Review 607 (1992); 

Professor Curtis has testified before congressional and judicial committees on sentencing, parole, and post-conviction remedies. From 1990 to 1995, he served as the first President of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, created by voters in Los Angeles and overseeing campaign finance regulations, governmental ethics, and distributing millions of dollars in matching campaign funds to eligible candidates for city elections. In 2007, Professor Curtis was appointed to serve on the New Haven Democracy Fund Board, charged with distributing public funds for political campaigns. 

He is a member of the American Law Institute and served as a consultant for law schools through the Association of American Law Schools. He chaired the AALS’s Committee on Clinical Legal Education and served as a director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. 

Professor Curtis received his B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy and his LL.B. from Yale.