Richard S. Frase

Former Co-Director, Robina Institute; Professor of Law Emeritus; Benjamin N. Berger Professor of Criminal Law Emeritus
Richard Frase

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Professor Richard S. Frase is the Benjamin N. Berger Professor of Criminal Law emeritus, and former Co-Director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. He is also the founder and former Co-Director of the Robina Institute’s Sentencing Guidelines Resource Center and the Institute’s Criminal History Enhancements project. He taught Criminal Law and the Federal Defense Clinic. He has also taught the Misdemeanor Prosecution Clinic, the Sentencing Guidelines Seminar, the Misdemeanor Prosecution Clinic, the Federal Prosecution Clinic, and seminars on sentencing policy and on comparative criminal procedure. His scholarship examines Minnesota and other state sentencing guidelines, punishment and proportionality theories, criminal procedure in the U.S. and abroad, and comparison of sentencing law and practice across U.S. states and between the U.S. and other nations. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine book titles (17 volumes) and over eighty-five articles, essays, and other writings on these topics.

Professor Frase graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford College. In 1970 he received his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago, where he was Comment Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He then clerked for the Honorable Luther M. Swygert, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and was an associate attorney for the law firm of Sidley & Austin in Chicago. From 1974 to 1977 Professor Frase was a research associate and Arnold Shure Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Center for Studies in Criminal Justice.

In 1977 he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School. He was the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law for 1988-89 and became Berger Professor in 1991. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Christian Albrechts Universität in Kiel, Germany, and at the Université Jean Moulin in Lyon, France, and a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg (Breisgau), Germany. Professor Frase is a member of the American Bar Association, the American Law Institute, the American Society of Criminology, and the Advisory Board of the Federal Sentencing Reporter. He is a frequent contributor to radio, television, and newspaper reports on criminal justice issues.