Professor Butler teaches in the areas of criminal law, race relations law, and jurisprudence. His scholarship has been published in many leading scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review (two articles), the Stanford Law Review and the UCLA Law Review (three articles). He has been awarded the Professor of the Year award three times by the GW graduating class. He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Acting Co-Director of the GW/Oxford Human Rights Program at Oxford University. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2003.