About Richard D. Friedman
Richard D. Friedman, the Alene and Allen F. Smith Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, is an expert on evidence and Supreme Court history. He is the general editor of The New Wigmore, a multi-volume treatise on evidence. His textbook, The Elements of Evidence, is now in its third edition, and he is co-author of Waltz, Park & Friedman's Evidence: Cases and Materials, now in its eleventh edition. He has also written many law review articles and essays.
In Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004), the Supreme Court radically transformed the law governing the right of an accused to "be confronted with the witnesses against him" by adopting a "testimonial" approach, which Professor Friedman had long advocated; he now maintains the Confrontation Blog (see link below) to comment on related issues and developments, and he successfully argued a follow-up case, Hammon v. Indiana, in the Supreme Court.
Professor Friedman earned a B.A. and a J.D. from Harvard, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a D.Phil. in modern history from Oxford University. He clerked for Chief Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then practiced law in New York City. He joined the Law School faculty in 1988 from Cardozo Law School. In 2010, he received the Patriot Award from the Washtenaw County Bar Association.
