Richard D. Schwartz is Ernest I. White Professor Emeritus at the College of Law of Syracuse University. He is currently Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Dr. Schwartz earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at Yale, and stayed on to do a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale's Institute of Human Relations. His first teaching was done in Yale College and at Yale Law School, where he worked with Joseph Goldstein, Richard Donnelly, and (in a second edition) Alan Dershowitz on a casebook that integrated social science and criminal law materials. That was followed by ten years of teaching and research at Northwestern, where he taught in both sociology and law. While at Northwestern, he headed the Council for Intersocietal Studies and helped to develop the joint J.D.-Ph.D. program in law and social science. He was also a co-founder of the Law & Society Association and the first editor of its journal, Law & Society Review.

Dr. Schwartz is author of many scholarly publications, including Society and the Legal Order, Unobtrusive Measures, Criminal Law: Theory and Process, and the Handbook of Regulation and Administrative Law. At Syracuse, he taught primarily in the law school, both in law and society and in "hard law" subjects such as criminal law, environmental law, and evidence. His current scholarly interests include natural law, administrative law, and the impact of welfare reform.