Michael Avery

Professor Emeritus

Suffolk Law School

After beginning as an ACLU staff lawyer during the Black Panther murder trial in New Haven in 1970, Michael Avery enjoyed a career over four decades as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer. On the civil side, he represented the victims of police abuse and racial and sexual discrimination. In criminal cases, he defended people charged with everything from peaceful protesting to murder. In Boston in 2007, working with a team of lawyers, he obtained the largest judgment ever awarded against the FBI, $101.7 million, for the wrongful conviction of four innocent men for murder. His client, Peter Limone, had spent 33 years in prison for a murder of which he was innocent. The crime was actually committed by an FBI informant.  

He has served as the President of the National Lawyers Guild and is one of the founders and a past president of the National Police Accountability Project. He enjoyed a sixteen-year career as a law professor at Suffolk Law School in Boston, where he is now professor emeritus. He has published several non-fiction books, including The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals, We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court, Handbook of Massachusetts Evidence, and Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation. He has published three novels: The Cooperating Witness, Murder in Blue, and Mama’s Boy. He is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and spent a year as an exchange student in the former Soviet Union at the University of Moscow. After retiring as a professor of law, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College. He resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.