Mark William Osler is an American legal scholar, law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, and critic of narcotics policy and capital punishment in the United States. He holds the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law at St. Thomas.
Background and Career
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Osler attended Grosse Pointe North High School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan and subsequently matriculated at College of William & Mary, graduating in 1985. Osler received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990 and clerked for District Court Judge Jan DuBois in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania before returning to Detroit. There, he worked from 1992-1995 for the law firm of Dykema Gossett, and then as an Assistant United States Attorney from 1995-2000. He began work as a law professor at Baylor University in 2000 before leaving for St. Thomas in 2010. At St. Thomas, he founded the nation's first law school clinic on federal commutations, and he has advocated for an expansive use of the presidential pardon power. His work has been profiled by The American Prospect, Rolling Stone and CBS News. Osler's recent work has focused on clemency and narcotics policy. His opinion pieces have appeared in both The New York Times, and the Washington Post, while his arguments in favor of narcotics policy reform appeared in law journals at Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, Rutgers, and DePaul. An article Osler co-authored with Rachel Barkow for the University of Chicago Law Review was highlighted in a lead editorial in The New York Times, in which the Times' editorial board expressly embraced Barkow and Osler's argument for clemency reform. He and Barkow also co-founded the Clemency Resource Center at NYU. Some of Osler's work has addressed sentencing issues involving crack cocaine. In 2009, Osler won the case of Spears v. United States in the United States Supreme Court, which reversed the Eighth Circuit and clarified a prior sentencing decision, declaring that sentencing judges could "categorically" reject the 100-to-1 ration between powder and crack cocaine which was then embedded in the federal sentencing guidelines. In his scholarship and advocacy, Osler often explicitly addresses Christian audiences, and he holds the Ruthie Mattox Chair of Preaching at First Covenant Church, Minneapolis. Osler is the author of Jesus on Death Row, which critiques capital punishment in the United States through an examination of the biblical account of Jesus Christ's trial and execution. Following up on the book, Osler and collaborators produced a dramatic "Sentencing of Jesus" in eleven states: Texas, Colorado, California, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Illinois, Virginia, Louisiana, Arizona, and Minnesota. His 2016 book, Prosecuting Jesus recounts that project. He has also commented on the death penalty and other issues for CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ESPN, and the Huffington Post. The character of "Professor Joe Fisher" in the film American Violet is based on Osler, and he appeared as a critic of narcotics policy in the 2013 National Geographic series "The 80's," and as a commentator in the 2014 National Geographic series "The Jesus Mysteries." He is a founding member of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a national group of former and current prosecutors and police chiefs. Osler was also the lawyer for Weldon Angelos, who was freed in 2016 after serving 12 years of a 55-year sentence on a marijuana and gun possession conviction.
