Daniel K. Crane-Hirsch, MA, JD

  • Attorney, US Department of Justice

Daniel Crane-Hirsch received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago with majors in philosophy and psychology. He received an MA in Philosophy and an MA in Bioethics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1996, and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1999. While in law school, he was a section editor for the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, and represented low-income clients with disabilities and mental illnesses at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Following law school, he was a law clerk for two years for the Hon. Lynn Adelman, U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Mental health issues are a strong interest: his third-year paper in law school examined how workers with “invisible” mental illnesses fare under the Americans with Disabilities Act; his MA thesis, Moral Responsibility, Depression, and Dysthymia, considered therapeutic ascriptions of responsibility to those who are depressed; and his college honors paper at the University of Chicago explored the morality of involuntary commitment of the mentally ill. While at the University of Pittsburgh, he also earned an MA in Philosophy, and gave presentations at the Center for Bioethics and Health Law and the national meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

In the Office of Consumer Litigation at the U.S. Justice Department, he conducts investigations and litigates pharmaceutical and adulterated food cases under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and prosecutes abusive telemarketers for violations of the Federal Trade Commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. From 2002 to 2005, he worked nearly four years on the Justice Department’s Tobacco Litigation Team in the federal government’s lawsuit against cigarette manufacturers. The United States won the lawsuit with a 1,500+ page final decision from the district court. United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc., F. Supp. 2d (D.D.C. 2006), appeal docketed, No. 06-5267 (D.C. Cir. Sept. 14, 2006). His work on that case included briefing a professional responsibility issue which led to a tobacco company lawyer’s being disqualified for violating the “revolving door” ethics rule which governs former government attorneys. United States v. Philip Morris, Inc., 312 F. Supp. 2d 27 (D.D.C. 2004).

Representative Publications

Pingeon JR, and Crane-Hirsch D. Summary of Professional Standards Governing Mental Health Services in Prisons and Jails. Center for Public Representation September 30, 1997.

Crane-Hirsch D. Kant’s views on suicide. Inquiry Spring 1990: 8.   

Selected Presentations

Annual legal ethics presentations. Federal American Inn of Court. Washington, D.C.: April 2004, April 2005, April 2006.

The Role of Moral Perception in Aristotle’s Conception of Phronēsis, American Society for the History of Rhetoric. New York City: April 1996.

“Persecuting in the Spirit of Love”: Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment and St. Augustine. Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland: March 1993.