Stephen Cody is an American legal scholar and Associate Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. As an interdisciplinary socio-legal researcher, his scholarship intersects criminal law, international human rights, and ocean governance. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Temple University, an M.Phil. in social anthropology from Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar, and both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Truman Scholar.
His academic focus relies on empirical methods to analyze how international and domestic legal frameworks function in practice. Before joining Suffolk’s faculty, he served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney and spent years as the Research Director of the Atrocity Response Program at Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Center. In that role, his fieldwork in post-conflict zones—including Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—involved interviewing hundreds of atrocity survivors to evaluate witness protection frameworks and victim participation at the International Criminal Court.
At Suffolk, Cody teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, and human rights. His recent scholarship explores the manipulation of legal architectures under international governance and systemic vulnerabilities in global resource spaces. His notable papers include Oceanic Impunity (2024), which critiques the limitations of international criminal enforcement mechanisms to prosecute transnational environmental atrocities, such as toxic dumping and illegal overfishing on the high seas.