Charles Ogletree

Charles James Ogletree Jr. (December 31, 1952 – August 4, 2023) was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

He was also the author of books on legal topics.

Ogletree was born on December 31, 1952, in Merced, California, to parents who were farm workers.

They later divorced.

He earned both his BA (1974, with distinction) and MA (1975) in political science from Stanford University and his JD from Harvard Law School in 1978.

While in law school he became president of the Black American Law Students Association (later known as the National Black Law Students Association).

After graduating from law school, Ogletree worked for the District of Columbia Public Defender Service until 1985, first as a staff attorney, then as training director, trial chief, and deputy director.

As an attorney, he represented such notable figures as Tupac Shakur and Anita Hill.

In 1985, Harvard Law School hired Ogletree as a visiting professor, promoting him in 1989 to assistant professor.

His area of specialization was clinical legal practice, including "the role of public defenders in society."

In 1990 he founded the Criminal Justice Institute, according to The Harvard Crimson "a clinic program through which law students represent indigent Boston-area clients in criminal court."

In 1992, he became the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and vice dean for clinical programs.

In 1993,

Ogletree received the National Conference on Black Lawyers People's Lawyer of the Year Award, the Man of Vision Award, Museum of Afro-American History (Boston), the Albert Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, Harvard Law School in 1993, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, 1995, the Ruffin-Fenwick Trailblazer Award, and the 21st Century Achievement Award, Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts.

In 2004, Harvard disciplined Ogletree for the plagiarism of six paragraphs from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said in his own book, All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education.

Ogletree apologized, saying that he "made a serious mistake during the editorial process of completing this book, and delegated too much responsibility to others during the final editing process."

Former Harvard President Derek C. Bok concluded, "There was no deliberate wrongdoing at all ... He marshaled his assistants and parceled out the work and in the process some quotation marks got lost."

Moderator of television programs, including State of the Black Union; Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community; (with others) Ethics in America; Hard Drugs, Hard Choices, Liberty and Limits: Whose Law, Whose Order?; Credibility in the Newsroom, Race to Execution, 2006; Beyond Black and White; Liberty & Limits: Whose Law, Whose Order?; That Delicate Balance II: Our Bill of Rights; and other Public Broadcasting Service broadcasts.

Television programs he was a guest on include Nightline, This Week with David Brinkley, McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Crossfire, Today Show, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, Cochran and Company :Burden of Proof, Tavis Smiley, Frontline, America's Black Forum, and Meet the Press.

He was a consultant to NBC news on the O. J. Simpson murder case, which he predicted would end in a "hung jury or an acquittal."

Interviewed about the case ten years later, Ogletree described it as one in which "the system worked," saying "At every significant point in this case, the government presented evidence, and the defense rebutted it with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When you have that, even though there is an assumption of guilt, even though there is a suspicion of guilt, even though there is a deep-seated feeling of guilt, the system says if you don't have an abiding conviction that the person is guilty, you have to find them not guilty."

Ogletree contributed to periodicals such as New Crisis, Public Utilities Fortnightly, and Harvard Law Review.

Ogletree also served as the moderator for a panel discussion on civil rights in baseball on March 28, 2008, that accompanied the second annual Major League Baseball civil rights exhibition game the following day between the New York Mets and the Chicago White Sox.

On July 21, 2009, Ogletree issued a statement in response to the arrest of his Harvard colleague and client, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose arrest at his own home became a major news story about the nexus of politics, police power, and race that summer.

Professor Ogletree later wrote a book about the events titled The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America.

Ogletree was a founder of the Benjamin Banneker Charter Public School and served on the school's foundation board.

The school library is named in his honor.

In February 2011, he gave a three-part lecture at Harvard Law School entitled "Understanding Obama", which provides an inside look at President Barack Obama's journey from boyhood in Hawaii to the White House.

Ogletree appeared in the 2013 documentary film, Justice is a Black Woman: The Life and Works of Constance Baker Motley and in the 2014 documentary, Hate Crimes in the Heartland, providing an analysis of the Tulsa Race Riots.

Ogletree was a member of the board of trustees at Stanford University.

He founded the Merced, California scholarships.

He was the chairman of the board of trustees of University of the District of Columbia.

While a student at Harvard Law School, he was elected national president of the Black Law Students Association.

Ogletree taught both Barack and Michelle Obama at Harvard; he remained close to Barack Obama throughout his political career.

Ogletree wrote opinion pieces on the state of race in the United States for major publications.

In 2014, Ogletree's wife started noticing health issues when he was 60 years old.

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at age 62 in May 2015.

On July 13, 2016, Ogletree announced he had been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's disease.

In 2019, Ogletree went missing and was found safe by the police after an extensive missing persons search.

Ogletree died on August 4, 2023, at the age of 70.