Stephen Bright is a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and the Harvey L. Karp Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. His area of expertise includes capital punishment and criminal law. He currently teaches a class titled Race and Poverty in Capital and Other Cases at Georgetown Law and a similar course at Yale Law School.

In his early career, Professor Bright was a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. and a legal services attorney at the Appalachian Research & Defense Fund of Kentucky. From 1982 to 2005, Professor Bright served as the director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. He also served as its president and senior counsel from 2006 to 2016.  Since its founding in 1976, the Center has worked with “civil rights organizations, families, and faith-based organizations to protect the civil and human rights of people of color, poor people, and other disadvantaged people facing the penalty” or incarcerated in the South. The attorneys at the Center provide individual and class action representation “challenging unconstitutional and unconscionable practices within the criminal justice system.”

Professor Bright has spent a significant portion of his career representing clients in capital cases. He has tried cases throughout the South, including before juries in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Professor Bright also worked as an appellate attorney, where he argued before state and federal appellate courts, as well as appearing before the United States Supreme Court four times. In his cases before the Supreme Court, Professor Bright litigated issues pertaining to racial discrimination in jury selection and a poor person’s right to a mental health expert while facing the death penalty. The Supreme Court decided for his clients in all four of his cases.