极乐禁地

Bessler has taught at the 极乐禁地 School of Law since 2009. He also has taught at the University of Minnesota Law School, the George Washington University Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, Rutgers School of Law, the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and the University of Trento in Italy. After graduating from law school in 1991, he worked as an associate in the Minneapolis office of Faegre & Benson, LLP (now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP), then clerked for U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. 鈥淛ack鈥� Mason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota from 1996 to 1998. He was later a partner at Kelly & Berens, P.A. and served as Of Counsel at its successor firm, Berens & Miller, P.A., in Minneapolis. He is now Of Counsel at Stinson LLP, a national law firm with 13 offices, including in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. He has more than 30 years of legal experience, including in complex commercial litigation.

At the 极乐禁地 School of Law, Bessler has taught courses in administrative law, antitrust, civil procedure, contracts, capital punishment, international human rights law, lawyering skills/legal writing, and torts. He is the faculty advisor to the moot court program, and from 2015 to 2017 served as the Region III Director of the National Moot Court Competition. In addition to his Of Counsel role at Stinson LLP, he is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center -- an academic affiliation he has held since 2010. In 2018, he was awarded the University System of Maryland Board of Regents' Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity, and in 2018 and 2024-2025 he was a visiting scholar/research fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School's Human Rights Center. In December 2024, he was elected as a new member of the American Law Institute.

Bessler has written or edited 12 books, many on the topic of capital punishment, and others on the foundation or origins of American law. One of his books, The Celebrated Marquis: An Italian Noble and the Making of the Modern World (Carolina Academic Press, 2018), is an award-winning biography of the 18th-century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria鈥攖he first Enlightenment thinker to make a comprehensive argument against the death penalty. He also has written extensively about Beccaria, the Enlightenment, and criminal justice issues in The Baron and the Marquis: Liberty, Tyranny, and the Enlightenment Maxim That Can Remake American Criminal Justice (Carolina Academic Press, 2019) and The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution (Carolina Academic Press, 2014).

The Birth of American Law was the recipient of the prestigious 2015 Scribes Book Award, an annual award given out since 1961 by The American Society of Legal Writers for 鈥渢he best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.鈥� That book also earned the First Prize in the American Association for Italian Studies Book Award competition (18th/19th century category) and was the Gold Winner in the IndieFab Book Award competition for works of history.

The Celebrated Marquis traces the global influence of the Italian philosopher and economist Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) on economics and the world鈥檚 constitutions and laws, and The Birth of American Law documents the influence of the Italian Enlightenment and Beccaria鈥檚 writings on the American Revolution and early American constitutions. Beccaria鈥檚 book, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), translated into French and then into English as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767), had a major influence on America鈥檚 founders and on early American laws. The Celebrated Marquis was the winner of the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award for biography, and it was also named a finalist in four other book award competitions. The Baron and the Marquis, about the history and future of American criminal justice reform, traces the origins of a maxim developed by Montesquieu and publicized by Beccaria. That maxim: Any punishment that goes beyond necessity is 鈥渢yrannical.鈥�

Bessler鈥檚 undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota is in political science, and in addition to an M.F.A. in Writing from St. Paul鈥檚 Hamline University, he has a master鈥檚 degree in international human rights law from Oxford University. His law degree is from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, where he was the Senior Managing Editor of the Indiana Law Journal and worked in the IU Student Legal Services office. In addition to his many books, he has written numerous book chapters, most recently for NYU Press, Temple University Press, and Cambridge University Press. His law review articles have appeared in the American Criminal Law Review, the Arkansas Law Review, the Northeastern University Law Review, the Montana Law Review, the Santa Clara Law Review, and elsewhere. A forthcoming article on anti-death penalty advocacy networks will appear in the Minnesota Journal of International Law.

A two-time Minnesota Book Award finalist, Professor Bessler edited Justice Stephen Breyer's Against the Death Penalty (Brookings Institution Press, 2016). That book reprints, contextualizes and annotates Justice Breyer's dissent in Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015), a case that upheld Oklahoma鈥檚 lethal injection protocol. In addition, his earlier book, Writing for Life: The Craft of Writing for Everyday Living (2007), received multiple awards. His recent books include The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition (Carolina Academic Press, 2017), a bronze medalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (World History category); Private Prosecution in America: Its Origins, History, and Unconstitutionality in the Twenty-First Century (Carolina Academic Press, 2022), the bronze medal winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (U.S. History category); and The Death Penalty鈥檚 Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).