Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

Sullivan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College and then from Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association and a general editor of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal.⁠[1]

He is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School.⁠[2]

He was born and raised in Gary, Indiana; after law school he spent a year in Nairobi with the Law Society of Kenya, sitting on a committee drafting a new Kenyan constitution.⁠[3]

Between 1995 and 2004 he served at different times as staff attorney, general counsel and finally director and chief executive officer of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.⁠[4]

In 2006 he testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Samuel A. Alito’s Supreme Court nomination, addressing his Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.⁠[3]

He had previously taught at Yale Law School, winning its award for outstanding teaching after his first year, and joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 2007.⁠[5]

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s indigent defense agency was reorganized with his assistance as executive counsel into a fully functioning office with full-time staff.⁠[6]

In 2008 he chaired the Criminal Justice Advisory Committee of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and was later appointed an adviser to the Department of Justice presidential transition team.⁠[1]

In February 2009 Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds appointed Sullivan and law school lecturer Stephanie Robinson as Masters of Winthrop House (a role later called faculty dean), the first African-American House Masters in Harvard’s history. Sullivan said ethnic diversity was one quality among many that they brought to the House.⁠[7]

In December 2011, as director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, he was appointed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees legal representation for indigent people.⁠[5]

In April 2014 newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson appointed Sullivan special counsel for the reorganized Conviction Review Unit, to lead reinvestigations of possible wrongful convictions.⁠[4]

Thompson said he had inherited more than 100 wrongful-conviction claims, which was why he created the unit and persuaded Sullivan to come to Brooklyn to run it.⁠[8]

By May 2015 the unit had taken on about 130 cases, completed 38 reviews and exonerated 12 people; the system Sullivan designed emphasized “a conjoint search for the truth” between prosecution and defense, with an independent legal review panel making final decisions.⁠[2]

He represented the family of Michael Brown in reaching a settlement with the city of Ferguson on a wrongful death claim after the U.S. Department of Justice had declined to prosecute.⁠[9]

In October 2016 he gave the talk “How I help free innocent people from prison” at TEDxMidAtlantic, describing how and why people end up wrongly imprisoned and the consequences.⁠[10]

On April 14, 2017, a Suffolk Superior Court jury acquitted former New England PatriotsNew England PatriotsThe New England Patriots are an NFL professional American football team in the AFC East, based at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Founded in 1959, they began AFL play as the Boston Patriots in 1960 and adopted their current name in 1971. Robert Kraft has owned the team since 1994. The Bill Belichick–Tom Brady era produced six Super Bowl titles, and Mike Vrabel became head coach in 2025.Open the full entry player Aaron Hernandez of first-degree murder in a 2012 double slaying, convicting him only of unlawful gun possession. Defense attorney Sullivan said the jury had seen through the “smoke and mirrors” of the state’s case; District Attorney Daniel Conley said the prosecution’s theory stood.⁠[11]

In 2018 St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner hired Sullivan to help prosecute Missouri Governor Eric Greitens on an invasion-of-privacy charge. On May 14, during jury selection, Sullivan announced in court that the charge was being dropped; Gardner’s office said a ruling allowing Gardner to be called as a witness left it unable to proceed and that it would refile, while Greitens’s lawyers said the case would never be charged again.⁠[12]

In January 2019 Sullivan confirmed that he, along with Jose Baez and Pamela Mackey, had been retained to defend Harvey Weinstein in his Manhattan sexual assault case, saying Weinstein steadfastly maintained his innocence.⁠[13]

On January 25 he wrote to Winthrop students and tutors about the nature of criminal defense in the United States, stressing that every defendant is cloaked with the presumption of innocence and that the “unpopular defendant” in particular must receive the same process.⁠[14]

Some students circulated petitions, open letters and protests calling for Sullivan’s removal, arguing that representing Weinstein conflicted with his role as faculty dean. In February Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana said a faculty member has academic freedom to make decisions that are right for them and that everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense.⁠[15]

On February 25 Khurana announced a “climate review” of Winthrop House led by former Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman, and in March the College sent an anonymous survey to residents.⁠[16]

On March 7, 52 Harvard law professors signed a letter stating that ending the couple’s roles as faculty deans would be inconsistent with the university’s commitment to freedom of ideas.⁠[17]

On March 31 the Harvard Black Law Students Association issued a statement supporting Sullivan’s decision and criticizing the climate review as an outsized response with racist undertones, while affirming its support for survivors of sexual violence.⁠[18]

In May more than a dozen current and former Winthrop tutors, students and staff alleged that Sullivan and Robinson had created a climate of hostility and suspicion since 2016. In a statement Sullivan denied their characterization, said the two had always been committed to an appropriate environment for students and staff, and said they could not discuss personnel matters by law.⁠[19]

On May 11 Khurana announced that the two would not be reappointed when their term ended on June 30, saying efforts to improve the climate had been ineffective, the faculty deans’ absence at critical moments had worsened it, and the situation had become “untenable.”⁠[20]

Khurana also called it a regrettable and very hard decision and said he had long admired the faculty deans’ commitment to justice and civic engagement.⁠[21]

Sullivan and Robinson responded that they were surprised and dismayed, saying talks with senior University representatives had been progressing positively until Harvard unilaterally ended them, and apologized for the stress the controversy had caused students; both kept their law school posts.⁠[20]

A Harvard spokeswoman rejected the suggestion that he lost the post because of the Weinstein representation, saying the decision was informed by a number of considerations, including staff complaints predating the controversy; Sullivan’s defenders argued that students were forsaking the principles of the American justice system.⁠[22]

The same month a judge approved Sullivan’s request to withdraw from Weinstein’s defense, which he said was because the trial’s rescheduling to September 9, 2019, created an unresolvable conflict with his teaching obligations at Harvard Law School.⁠[23]

Scholars including Harvard Medical School professor Jeffrey Flier criticized the decision, arguing that treating students’ claims of emotional harm as grounds to remove a faculty dean would diminish intellectual discourse at the university.⁠[24]

On June 24, 2019, Sullivan published an op-ed in The New York Times writing that “feelings alone should not drive university policy” and arguing that Harvard had missed an opportunity to help students distinguish feelings with a rational basis from those without. Asked to respond, a Harvard spokesperson repeated that the decision was “not directly related” to the Weinstein representation.⁠[25]

The commentator Robby Soave wrote in support of Sullivan, arguing that too many elite universities had deferred to the demands of a small number of activist students, making campuses less friendly to free expression and due process.⁠[26]

On March 22, 2021, as a Harvard law professor and former lawyer for Harvey Weinstein and Aaron Hernandez, he appeared on episode 170 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing the Weinstein case, Harvard’s decision under pressure, cancel culture, evil, the criminal justice system, racism in the judicial system, the Derek Chauvin trial, O. J. Simpson and Aaron Hernandez.⁠[27]

As of October 2026 he is the Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, faculty director of the Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop and faculty director emeritus of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute.⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/profronsullivan (opens in a new window)⁠[27]

Harvard Law School: Official website: https://hls.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]