In 2019, Harcourt received from the New York City Bar Association the Norman J. Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award for his longtime advocacy on behalf of individuals on death row.

As a lawyer, Harcourt has represented inmates on death and those serving life imprisonment without parole. His most notable clients include Walter McMillian, and Doyle Lee Hamm, whose 2018 execution was called off because an IV line could not be set.

In 2018, he published The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens.

In 2016, he published Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, which explores how digital practices have transformed the circulation of power in contemporary society and produced what he refers to as a new “expository society”. Exposed was translated into French as La Société d’exposition and reviewed in Le Monde and Le Figaro.

In 2015, Harcourt was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Aix-Marseille University in France for his contributions to contemporary critical thought.

       i.  Wrong-doing, truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice. University of Chicago Press. 2014. ISBN 9780226257709. OCLC 905163601.
       j.  Guns, crime, and punishment in America. New York Univ. Press. 2003. ISBN 978-0814736555. OCLC 845548019.
       k.  2005/2014 – Carceral Notebooks (editor), Vol. 1–10. in Law Enforcement Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Issues. Ed Brian D. Fitch. SAGE Publications, 2013 ISBN 9781483312538

In 2012, he published, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order which explored the relationship between laissez faire and mass incarceration.

He is also the recipient of the 2009 Gordon J. Laing Prize for his 2007 book, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in the Actuarial Age.

Harcourt is also an academic. He was appointed the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology at University of Chicago in 2003 and elected chairman of the Department of Political Science in 2010. In 2013, he became a chaired professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Since 2014, he has been the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University.

Harcourt was raised in New York City and attended the Lycée Français de New York. He earned a B.A. degree in political theory from Princeton University in 1984, a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1989, and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard in 2000.

He has also edited works by Michel Foucault in French and English. He is the editor of the French edition of Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on Théories et institutions pénales (published by Gallimard in 2015) and Foucault’s 1973 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive (published by Gallimard in 2013). He is the co-editor, with Fabienne Brion, of Foucault’s 1981 Louvain lectures Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice.

Bernard E. Harcourt (born 1963) is an American critical theorist with a specialization in the area of punishment, surveillance, legal and political theory, and political economy. He also does pro-bono legal work on human rights issues.