Eric C. Sapp spent his youth in New Jersey. He received a Bachelor of Arts with Highest Honors from the University of Virginia as well as a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he focused on constitutional law, jurisprudence, and international human rights, and where he also worked on asylum in the immigration law clinic. In the private practice of law, he represented defendants in protest-related civil and criminal misdemeanor cases, among other areas of law. He has done extensive graduate studies (ABD) at Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature, where his dissertation research focused on the juridical structure of the so-called War on Terror during the Bush II and Obama eras, including regarding issues of arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial killing, and expansive criminalization based on terrorism-related designations. Additionally, he has published articles on the comparative history of philosophy.
As an activist, he has been especially involved in the (overlapping) anti-imperialist and peace movements. Eric believes that all prisoners are political prisoners.