Prof. Rachel Harmon

Rachel Harmon is the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law, the F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights, and Director of the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia School of Law. She is a leading scholar on policing and the laws that regulate police behavior. Her casebook, “The Law of the Police” (2d ed. 2024), is the first resource for students and others seeking to understand and evaluate how American law governs police interactions with the public. Her scholarship on policing has appeared in the Columbia, New York University, Michigan and Stanford law reviews, among others. From 2023 to 2024, she served as senior policy adviser for criminal justice on the White House Domestic Policy Council. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and served as an associate reporter for ALI’s project on Principles of the Law of Policing. She advises nonprofits and government actors on issues of policing and the law, and in the fall of 2017, served as a law enforcement expert for the “Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia.” Prior to academia, she spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. She has clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court.