Steven L. Winter

Steven L. Winter is the Walter S. Gibbs Professor of Constitutional Law at Wayne State University Law School. He has taught at the Brooklyn, University of Miami, American, Cardozo, Rutgers-Newark, and Yale Law Schools. He is the author of numerous articles on constitutional law and legal theory, including The Metaphor of Standing and the Problem of Self-Governance; Bull Durham and the Uses of Theory; An Upside/Down View of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, The "Power" Thing; Melville, Slavery, and the Failure of the Judicial Process; What Makes Modernity Late?; and, most recently, Reimagining Democracy for Social Individuals.

From 1978 to 1986, he served as an Assistant Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., where he worked on more than a dozen Supreme Court cases including brief and argument in Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), the landmark case holding the common law fleeing felon rule unconstitutional.

He has served as a consultant for the Helsinki Watch Committee and the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2001, he filed a brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of Intellectual Property Creators and the Society of Amateur Scientists as amici curiae in Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd., 532 U.S. 722 (2002), using developments in cognitive linguistics to argue successfully against reliance on the use of literal language in patent law.

In June of 2012, the Dutch journal Rechtsfilosofie & Rechtstheorie will be dedicating a special issue to his work.

Professor Winter is currently working on a book about consumerism and democracy