Margaret Burnham

Margaret A. Burnham is an American lawyer, judge, and legal scholar whose writing grows out of a long career in civil rights work and public service. She is a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, where she founded the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, an initiative that investigates racial violence and other failures of justice from the Jim Crow era.

Before her academic career, she worked as a civil rights lawyer and later served on the bench in Massachusetts. She has become especially well known to readers for By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners, a widely praised book that examines unsolved racist killings and the legal systems that enabled them.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944, Burnham studied history at Tougaloo College and earned her law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Her background in law, history, and activism gives her work a clear sense of urgency, while her writing remains accessible to readers interested in justice, memory, and American history.