Albert W. Alschuler is an American legal scholar best known for his work in criminal procedure and criminal law. He is the Julius Kreeger Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Colorado, and the University of Pennsylvania, and is known particularly for a study of plea bargaining. Early life and education Alschuler was born in Aurora, Illinois on September 24, 1940. His father, Sam Alschuler, was an Aurora lawyer and his mother, Winifred King Alschuler, a teacher and homemaker. He attended public schools in Aurora and graduated from Harvard College in 1962. In 1965, he graduated from the Harvard Law School where he was an officer of the Harvard Law Review. Career Alschuler was a law clerk to Illinois Supreme Court Justice Walter V. Schaefer and a special assistant to Fred M. Vinson, Jr., United States Assistant Attorney General in Charge of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division. He began his academic career in 1966 as an assistant professor at the The University of Texas School of Law, and was promoted to full professor in 1969. From 1976 through 1984, he was a professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He taught briefly at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 1985. At Chicago, he was promoted to Wilson-Dickinson Professor in 1988 and to Julius Kreeger Professor in 2002. After taking emeritus status at Chicago in 2006, he became a professor of law at Northwestern University for five years and then retired. Research Plea bargaining Alschuler's interviews with lawyers and judges in ten American cities in the 1960s led to his studies of the prosecutor's, defense attorney's, and trial judge's roles in plea bargaining. He reported that prosecutors fearing defeat at trial brought extraordinary pressure to plead guilty on defendants who might be innocent, that some defense attorneys pocketed small fees in advance and pressed nearly all of their clients to plead guilty, and that many trial judges allowed bargaining prosecutors to determine nearly all criminal sentences. Returning to the topic fifty years after his first study, he described plea bargaining as a nearly perfect device for convicting the innocent and as a major cause of mass incarceration. Other criminal justice issues Alschuler was an early critic of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. He later contended