Andrew Manuel Crespo is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal law and procedure and serves as Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. His writing on the American penal system has appeared in The New York Times,Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Justices Kagan and Breyer at the Supreme Court, worked as a public defender in D.C., and served on Biden's Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.

You might know him from the news, as most recently, he served as general counsel to the Harvard AAUP faculty chapter in its lawsuit against the Trump administration's demands that Harvard restrict speech or face cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding — a fight that ended with a federal court ruling that the administration's attacks flagrantly violated the Constitution.

This was one of those conversations that could have gone anywhere and, luckily, went everywhere. We covered the many hats Andrew wears as he describes his day-to-day as a densely packed atom, and his life as a braid of identities and experiences — a father, a brother, a son, an educator, a lawyer, an organizer. And then it went to one particular place: how might we unearth what we truly stand for — our ‘political values’ as Andrew puts it — and how might we put these values into action in our everyday lives? Sprinkled throughout the conversation are personal stories, nuggets of wisdom, music and psychedelics(!), not in the ways you might think.