Dennis Riordan ’74, a top Bay Area criminal appellate attorney, passed away on August 11, 2022 at age 73.
Throughout his career, Riordan worked to regain freedom for wrongfully incarcerated persons convicted of serious felonies. Among his many courtroom successes was overturning the conviction of Johnny Spain, one of six Black Panther members accused of murdering three prison guards in the “San Quentin Six” case. Riordan continuously appeared on lists of top lawyers in San Francisco and California.
The San Francisco Chronicle called Riordan “The Last Hope.” “I guess it’s a reference to the fact that by the time the client gets to me, he or she is already in very big trouble,” Riordan told NYU Law in a 2006 interview.
As a law student, Riordan was a Root-Tilden Scholar and an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow. He was inducted into the Order of the Coif and received the American Jurisprudence Award twice: for Contracts and for Criminal Procedure.
His advice for law students in the 2006 interview: “There’s no safe, secure path to being a successful litigator. If that’s what you want, at some point you’ll have to take a risk, generally passing up position or money to strike out on your own. The payoff is that you get to practice law, not watch somebody else do it.”
Posted on August 23, 2022