​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Adapted from the biographical description accompanying his induction into the MSU School of Criminal Justice Wall of Fame]

​​

Dr. Christopher Smith grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with parents who were both professors at Western Michigan University. As a youth in the 1960s, Dr. Smith was exposed to civil rights activism through his parents’ engagement in various issues, including his family's role as plaintiffs in the NAACP lawsuit that led a federal judge to order the desegregation of the Kalamazoo public schools. His experiences as a student in public schools undergoing desegregation, as well as parental influences, shaped his career goals and research topics on constitutional rights and inequality.

 

After graduating from Kalamazoo Central High School, Dr. Smith was awarded a National Merit Scholarship to attend Harvard University where he earned a degree in Government. During college, he sought to use his coursework and extracurricular experiences to prepare for an intended career in civil rights work. Thus, he completed internships at American Civil Liberties Union offices in Boston and Washington, D.C., and at the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Seattle. After college, he was awarded a Rotary Graduate Fellowship that enabled him to earn a master’s degree in the Sociology Department at the University of Bristol in England. Subsequently, he graduated in the top ten percent of his class from the University of Tennessee College of Law and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Connecticut. During graduate school, his experiences teaching classes inside two prisons shifted his professional interests away from legal work and toward a career in teaching. He also spent two years as a part-time political science instructor at the University of Connecticut's branch campus at Hartford.

 

Dr. Smith’s first full-time faculty position was in the Political Science Department at the University of Akron where he spent seven years teaching courses on the U.S. Supreme Court, judicial processes, and criminal justice policy.
In 1994, he jumped at the opportunity to join the faculty at the MSU School of Criminal Justice and thereby move back to his home state. When he arrived in East Lansing, he was returning to the very campus where he lived in married student housing as a small child at Spartan Village and Cherry Lane Apartments while his parents were graduate students at MSU from 1961 to 1964.

 

During his thirty-one years on the MSU faculty, he received several awards including MSU’s Teacher-Scholar Award (1997) and the annual award as the most outstanding teacher in MSU’s College of Social Science (2012). Over the course of his career, he gained national recognition for his extensive publication record that includes 25 books and more than 130 scholarly articles and book chapters. His books include such titles as Courts and the Poor (1991), Courts and Public Policy (1993), and Constitutional Rights: Myths and Realities (2004). His most memorable research project led him to be invited to the U.S. Supreme Court to conduct interviews with the late Justice John Paul Stevens and resulted in the publication of a book, John Paul Stevens: Defender of Rights in Criminal Justice (2015).

 

During the course of his career as a university professor, he was also a candidate for Congress, the head of the Michigan Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, and an expert witness for legislative hearings on capital punishment.  He wrote about his varied experiences in the realm of practical politics and public policy in his forthcoming book, Democracy in the United States? The Education of an Accidental Scholar-Activist (Cornell University Press, expected 2026).