Portrait of public defender Andrew Manuel Crespo

Andrew Crespo ’05 connects the law to real life.

Andrew Manuel Crespo

As a public defender, Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05, J.D. ’08, met his first client on Christmas Eve 2011. Handcuffed and shackled, the client had just celebrated, in juvenile lockup, his eighth birthday. Seated, his feet didn’t touch the floor. “I remember walking in and just being stunned,” recalls the newly appointed assistant law professor. “Like, this is my job now: I represent eight-year-olds who are in handcuffs.” A two-time Supreme Court clerk and the first Latino president of the Harvard Law Review, Crespo aims to interrogate the gap between the criminal-justice system’s ideals and its reality. That gap “crystallized” for him during first-year “Criminal Law”; his own students now probe the same disparity in Crespo’s popular course “Popular Criminalism.” Before turning to law, Crespo was a social-studies concentrator who examined how Boston community organizations knit connections among ethnic groups. His thesis adviser, Kennedy School senior lecturer Marshall Ganz, recalls a student who could “dive into the nitty-gritty” and still master the “broader context”—like a great composer, able to originate a theme, but also “get every note right.” The musical analogy is apt, given Crespo’s guiltiest secret: a cappellaHe performed with the Veritones throughout college, and a Veritones friend introduced him to his future wife—Abby Shafroth ’04, J.D. ’08, now a civil-rights attorney—on the Dudley Co-op dance floor. Well aware that the justice system is flawed, Crespo nevertheless connects it to his favorite college memories of “long discussions and debates” among his best friends. “The law,” he says, “continues that same conversation about our social fabric—the values we care about, and how we make them real, in lived, daily experience.”

Read more articles by Michael Zuckerman

You might also like

Preserving the History of Jim Crow Era Safe Havens

Architectural historian Catherine Zipf is building a database of Green Book sites.  

Your Guide to Summer 2025 Along Boston Harbor

Enjoying Boston Harbor’s Renaissance this summer

Julia Rooney’s Cyanotype Art At Harvard

Julia Rooney’s paintings cross the analog-digital divide.

Most popular

Two Years of Doxxing at Harvard

What happens when students are publicly named and shamed for their views?

A New Narrative of Civil Rights

Political philosopher Brandon Terry’s vision of racial progress

How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard

Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.

Explore More From Current Issue

Johnston Gate

Your Views on Harvard’s Standoff, Antisemitism, and More

Readers comment on the controversial July-August cover, authoritarianism, and scientific research.

Julie Riew, wearing a white dress, playing guitar and singing into a microphone on stage.

Bringing Korean Stories to Life

Composer Julia Riew writes the musicals she needed to see.

Two people moving large abstract painting with blue V-shaped design in museum courtyard.

A Harvard Art Museums Painting Gets a Bath

Water and sunlight help restore a modern American classic.