Prof. Rachel Barkow

Rachel E. Barkow is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Faculty Director of its Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. A leading scholar of criminal law and administrative law, she is the author of Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration (2019) and Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration (2025). From 2013 to 2019 she served as a member of the United States Sentencing Commission, and in 2019 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School.