Career
He was the executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law. He retired in 2014 and is now Executive Director, Emeritus. An award winning legal affairs journalist, he is the co-author with David Protess of A Promise of Justice on the pardons of the Ford Heights Four, and Gone in the Night on the reversal of David Dowaliby"s conviction.
He provides a legal analysis in the 2005 Northwestern edition reprinting of The Dead Alive, a 19th-century novel by Wilkie Collins based on the 1819 wrongful murder conviction of the Boorn Brothers.
A recipient of numerous journalism awards, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2004. Warden founded the monthly journal Chicago Lawyer in 1978, serving as editor and publisher until 1989.
Before that, he was an award-winning journalist on the Chicago Daily News. Profile by Mara Tapp in the Chicago Tribune:
Rob Warden and David Protess are about the last people a prosecutor wants to see waiting outside the courtroom.
That is just the way they like it, because they have spent their professional lives as journalists warning as loudly as they could of the unexamined power of the government to destroy innocent people through the power of wrongful prosecution.
