Professor

John

D.

Bessler

John Bessler has taught at the University of Baltimore 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. A former Senior Managing Editor of the Indiana Law Journal, he clerked for U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. “Jack” Mason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota from 1996 to 1998, and practiced law full-time for many years as a civil litigator in Minneapolis. In 2018, he was awarded the University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity and was a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Human Rights Center. For the 2024-2025 academic year, he is again a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School's Human Rights Center.

At the University of Baltimore School of Law, he has taught courses in administrative law, antitrust, civil procedure, contracts, capital punishment, international human rights law, lawyering skills/legal research and writing, and torts. Since 2010, he has also taught a Capital Punishment Seminar as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He was previously an associate at the Minneapolis law firm of Faegre & Benson (now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP) and a partner at the Minneapolis law firm of Kelly & Berens, P.A., now Berens & Miller, P.A. He also previously worked in Minneapolis at Leonard, Street & Deinard, P.A. (now Stinson LLP) and from 2016 to 2019 was Of Counsel to Berens & Miller, P.A. Beginning in 2025, in addition to his teaching duties, he will be serving in an Of Counsel role at Stinson LLP, a national law firm. From 2015 to 2017, he served as the Region III Director of the National Moot Court Competition.

He has written or edited twelve books and numerous book chapters and law review articles, many on the topic of capital punishment and others on the history and foundation 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 a biography of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794)—the 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 2015 Scribes Book Award, an annual award given out since 1961 by The American Society of Legal Writers for “the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.” 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 Birth of American Law documents the influence of the Italian Enlightenment and Beccaria’s writings on the American Revolution and early American constitutions. 

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’s lethal injection protocol. Other recent books include The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition (Carolina Academic Press, 2017), Private Prosecution in America: Its Origins, History, and Unconstitutionality in the Twenty-First Century (Carolina Academic Press, 2022), and The Death Penalty’s Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).