Joseph Margulies

Professional Biography

For those who care about titles, I am a Professor of the Practice of Government at Cornell University. Like most people, however, I have diverse interests that are not well captured by the content of my business card. If I were to sum up the professional side of my life, I would say that I am a writer, litigator and teacher. But all my work shares common themes, the most important of which is that I am opposed to demonization in all its forms. I long ago distilled my personal philosophy to eight words: There is no them, there is only us.

This philosophy links me, at a level of shared humanity, to people who have caused unimaginable pain, but also to those who have endured it. It links me to people whose beliefs and behavior I admire a great deal, but also to those whose values I abhor. In every way that matters, I know that I am no different from them and they are no different from me. If history and science teach us anything, it is that any of us can do monstrous things, and if all of us can be monstrous, then none of us are monsters, which is why I do not believe in the Other, that mythical creature we are so quick to find and eager to cast out.

In my work—on the page, in the courtroom and in the classroom—I try to bring this philosophy to life. I have written a slew of articles and four books. My most recent book, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration (Beacon 2026), introduces the idea of a forgiving society and contrasts it with our own, a society that is uncaring, ungenerous, and unyielding—in a word, unforgiving. The book is built around the lives of six people, each of whom did something terrible. But rather than ask simply what they did, which is the only question that an unforgiving society asks, I take a very deep dive into what happened. Peering into the farthest reaches of causation, I ask what brought a human being to the worst day of their life, and how they have reckoned with the harm they caused and the pain they inflicted. Their stories challenge us to find ourselves in their tangled trajectories.

The book is a call to see us in them and them in us, and in that way, to recognize the humanity we all share. The society that struggles to understand this truth, and that brings it to life even for those who have done great wrongs, is a forgiving society, and the very opposite of our own. It is the society I want to create and where I want my children and grandchildren to live. Cast Out is the best and most important work I have ever done.

My other books are: Thanks for Everything, Now Get Out: Can We Restore Neighborhoods Without Destroying Them? (Yale 2021); What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity (Yale 2013); and Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (Simon & Schuster 2006). Guantanamo won a bunch of awards, which was very nice.

As a civil rights lawyer, I was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush (2004), which gave Guantánamo detainees the right to challenge their detention in federal court, and in Munaf v. Geren (2008), which gave American citizens the right to challenge their detention by the U.S. government, regardless of where they are held in the world.

Presently I represent Abu Zubaydah, who was imprisoned and tortured in CIA black sites and whose interrogation in 2002 and 2003 prompted the Bush Administration to draft the infamous "torture memos.” Abu Zubaydah’s case came before the Supreme Court in another case of mine, US v. Abu Zubaydah (2022), which was the first time the Supreme Court recognized that the so-called “enhanced interrogations” were, in fact, torture. I am also the director of The Compassionate Release Project, which represents federal prisoners in motions for compassionate release.

You can read some of my short essays on these and related topics here.

Education

B.A., with Honors, Cornell University, 1982
J.D., cum laude, Northwestern University Law School, 1988