Gregory Richard was born in Opelousas, Louisiana. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he earned an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree in history with a minor in criminal justice in 2001. He then attended the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He would earn his Juris Doctor and a Bachelor of Civil Law in 2004. Realizing he was not the type of person who would enjoy the practice of law, he began going after his original dream, earning his Master of Arts degree in history from the UL-Lafayette in 2008. Here, he studied Louisiana’s death penalty, in particular, the moratorium on executions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, he would attend the University of Mississippi, where he would earn his Doctor of Philosophy in history in 2013. His research there included the US federal court reform of southern prison farms in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Fall of 2013, he joined the faculty of the Department of History & Legal Studies at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, where he will focus on teaching and researching US Legal and Constitutional History. He is the Director of Legal Studies.
