Cornell University. Photo: sach1tb, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cornell_University,_Ho_Plaza_and_Sage_Hall.jpg)
Gallery of Leigh Bienen
University of Iowa. Photo: Billwhittaker ( talk ) at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_Hall.JPG)
Gallery of Leigh Bienen
Rutgers University. Photo: Zeete, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Queens,_New_Brunswick,_NJ_-_looking_north,_2014.jpg)
Career
Gallery of Leigh Bienen
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Photo: Jeffrey M. Vinocur, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University_of_Pennsylvania_Law_School-angled.JPG)
Gallery of Leigh Bienen
Princeton University. Photo: Magneticcarpet, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ClevelandTowerWatercolor20060829.jpg)
Gallery of Leigh Bienen
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Photo: Ivylaw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northwestern_Law_Rubloff_Building.jpg)
University of Iowa. Photo: Billwhittaker ( talk ) at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_Hall.JPG)
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Photo: Jeffrey M. Vinocur, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:University_of_Pennsylvania_Law_School-angled.JPG)
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Photo: Ivylaw, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northwestern_Law_Rubloff_Building.jpg)
Defining Incest(Single-authored article published in the Northwestern Uni...)1998
nonfiction book
Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O.J. Simpson
(Co-written with criminologist Gilbert Geis and published ...)
Co-written with criminologist Gilbert Geis and published by Northeastern University Press, the book examines five celebrated American criminal cases, including those of Leopold and Loeb and O.J. Simpson.
(Her debut collection of fiction, published by Ontario Rev...)
Her debut collection of fiction, published by Ontario Review Press, ranges from legal drama to domestic comedy and includes her award-winning story 'My Life As a West African Gray Parrot.'
Leigh Buchanan Bienen is an American lawyer, legal educator, and writer whose work centers on capital punishment, sex crimes, and rape reform legislation. Born in Berkeley, California, she worked as a public defender in New Jersey and later became a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. She is also the author of the story collection The Left-Handed Marriage and co-authored Crimes of the Century with Gilbert Geis.
Background
Leigh Buchanan Bienen was born on April 24, 1938, in Berkeley, California, to Norman Sharpe Buchanan and Janet Buchanan (Saniter) Arnold. In 1938 Berkeley was a university town on San Francisco Bay, home to the University of California, whose law school would later become a place of work for her.
In the early 1960s she spent two years in Africa, from 1963 to 1965, while her husband, Henry S. Bienen, carried out fieldwork for his graduate degree and taught as a visiting professor at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda. Makerere was then a college of the University of East Africa, a regional institution training professionals during the years of decolonization. She returned to Africa during her law school years, spending time in Nigeria in 1972 and 1973 while her husband worked at the University of Ibadan, which had been founded in 1948 as Nigeria's first university. Her later scholarship included studies of criminal homicide and criminal insanity in Western Nigeria.
Education
Bienen's undergraduate education took place at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in 1960. Cornell was founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, combining a land-grant mission with liberal arts and professional instruction. While at Cornell she was a Dean's Scholar.
She then studied at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she received a Master of Arts in 1963. The university's Writers' Workshop, established in 1936, became one of the most influential graduate creative writing programs in the United States, and it shaped the literary training of many American fiction writers.
Bienen received her Juris Doctor from Rutgers University in 1975, studying at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, New Jersey. Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, traces its origins to Queen's College, founded in 1766. During law school she carried out a detailed research project on homicide, which she later described as producing two academic papers in law journals before her graduation.
After graduating in 1975, Bienen began her professional career as a research attorney at the Center for Rape Concern in Philadelphia, an anti-rape organization, from 1975 to 1976. She then served as a law associate at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1976 to 1977.
In 1977 she became an assistant deputy public defender and director of the Special Projects Section in the New Jersey Department of the Public Advocate, a state agency responsible for public defense and advocacy. She held this post until 1991. In that role she directed an empirical study of all homicide cases in New Jersey after capital punishment was reimposed there, and she drafted a model sex offense statute that became the basis for rape reform legislation in a number of states, including New Jersey in 1979.
Her teaching career developed alongside her public defense work. She lectured at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia in the spring of 1981. The law school, founded in 1850, is one of the oldest law schools in the United States. She also taught at Princeton University, serving as lecturer in 1977, 1982, 1984, 1987, and from 1991 to 1994. From 1991 to 1994 she was administrative director of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, a school founded in 1930 as a center for public policy education and named after the university's former president and later United States president.
Bienen joined the Northwestern University School of Law in January 1995 as a senior lecturer, the same year her husband became president of Northwestern University. Northwestern, a private research university founded in 1851 in Evanston, Illinois, runs its law school in Chicago. From 1998 to 2003 she directed the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, which analyzes a handwritten Chicago police record of more than 11,000 homicides from 1870 to 1930. In 2007 she was project director for The Life and Times of Florence Kelley in Chicago, and she was later a member of the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee.
Drafted a model sex offense statute that became the basis for rape reform legislation in a number of states and was enacted in New Jersey in 1979.
Directed an empirical study of all homicide cases in New Jersey after capital punishment was reimposed in that state.
Directed the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, which analyzed a handwritten Chicago police record of more than 11,000 homicides from 1870 to 1930 and developed an interactive online archive of the data and related materials.
(Her debut collection of fiction, published by Ontario Rev...)
2001
Religion
Bienen is documented as a Presbyterian. Presbyterianism belongs to the Reformed branch of Protestant Christianity, whose theological roots lie in the sixteenth-century teaching of John Calvin and the Reformed churches of Switzerland, Scotland, and elsewhere in Europe.
Presbyterian churches are governed by elected elders who serve in local congregations and in regional bodies called presbyteries. The tradition gives central weight to Scripture and to confessional statements of faith, and it developed extensive institutions for education and church life in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Membership
Bienen was a member of the American Bar Association, the largest voluntary professional association of lawyers in the United States, founded in 1878. During 1984 and 1985 she took part in an association project on sex offender sentencing.
She served on the board of directors of the New Jersey American Civil Liberties Union from 1982 to 1992. The organization, the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, works to defend constitutional rights and civil liberties in New Jersey.
Her governance work also included service on the board of the Women's Rights Law Reporter, a law journal devoted to women's legal rights, from 1977. She later became vice president of the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago, an ensemble theatre company founded in 1988, and she has been a member of the Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee since 2005.
Participant in the association's project on sex offender sentencing.
American Bar Association
,
United States
1984 - 1985
Member of the board of directors.
New Jersey American Civil Liberties Union
,
United States
1982 - 1992
Member of the board of directors.
Women's Rights Law Reporter
,
United States
1977
Vice president of the board.
Lookingglass Theatre
,
United States
2003
Member.
Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee
,
United States
2005
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The poet Lawrence Joseph praised her debut collection of stories, describing her as a 'stunningly gifted writer' and noting the fearlessness of a first-rate lawyer, which he said she also is.
Interests
Her research interests have included animal rights, capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, rape and incest, and gender discrimination in higher education. She has also written plays, among them Acting Out and Bodies.
Connections
Bienen married Henry S. Bienen on April 28, 1961. Henry Bienen was a political scientist who served as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton before becoming president of Northwestern University in 1995, a position he held until 2009. In May 2008 Northwestern's School of Music was renamed the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music to honor the couple.
The Bienens have three daughters, Laura, Claire, and Leslie. In 2008 she described the family as having six grandchildren, and she has said that her family is closely connected to Northwestern.
Father:
Norman Sharpe Buchanan Arnold
Mother:
Janet Buchanan (Saniter) Arnold
Daughter:
Laura Bienen
Daughter:
Claire Bienen
Daughter:
Leslie Bienen
husband:
Henry S. Bienen
Political scientist and professor of politics and international affairs, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and president of Northwestern University from 1995 to 2009.
Northwestern Magazine, 'Lawyer, Teacher, Writer'
Magazine profile of Leigh Buchanan Bienen describing her roles as a senior lecturer at the School of Law, a writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a member of the Northwestern University community.
Recipient of a fiction prize for a story included in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1983.
Recipient of a fiction prize for a story included in O. Henry Prize Stories, 1983.
American Philosophical Society grant,
United States
Grantee, 1981–1982. The American Philosophical Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1743, is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States.
Grantee, 1981–1982. The American Philosophical Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1743, is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States.
MacDowell Colony fellowship,
United States
Fellow of the MacDowell Colony in 1979 and 1982. The MacDowell Colony, an artists' residency founded in 1907 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, supports writers, composers, and visual artists.
Fellow of the MacDowell Colony in 1979 and 1982. The MacDowell Colony, an artists' residency founded in 1907 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, supports writers, composers, and visual artists.
Yaddo residency,
United States
Writer's residency at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984.
Writer's residency at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984.
Blue Mountain Center residency,
United States
Residency at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, 1986–1987.
Residency at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, 1986–1987.
Dean's Scholar, Cornell University,
United States
Recognized as a Dean's Scholar while studying at Cornell University.
Recognized as a Dean's Scholar while studying at Cornell University.
Wallace Eljabar Fund grant,
United States
Grantee, 1974.
Grantee, 1974.
New Jersey Council on the Arts fiction grant,
United States
Fiction grantee, 1986–1987, awarded by the New Jersey state arts agency for her creative writing.
Fiction grantee, 1986–1987, awarded by the New Jersey state arts agency for her creative writing.
