Rachel E. Barkow

Rachel Barkow is the Vice Dean and Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy at NYU School of Law. She also serves as the Faculty Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU.  From 2013-2019, she served as a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission. Since 2010, she has also been a member of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office Conviction Integrity Policy Advisory Panel.

She is the author of Prisoner of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration(Harvard/Belknap 2019).  She has also written more than 20 articles, and she is recognized as one of the country’s leading experts on criminal law and policy.  Her scholarship has a particular focus on the ways in which criminal law should be seen through the lens of other regulatory areas and subject to similar checks and lessons of institutional design.

Professor Barkow teaches courses in criminal law, administrative law, and constitutional law. In 2013, she was the recipient of the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award. The Law School awarded her its Podell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007.

Barkow has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee; the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection; and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Barkow has also presented her work to the National Association of Sentencing Commissions Conference, the Federal Judicial Center’s National Sentencing Policy Institute, and the Judicial Conference of the Courts of Appeals for the First and Seventh Circuits.  After graduating from Northwestern University (B.A. ’93), Barkow attended Harvard Law School (’96), where she won the Sears Prize. She served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the D.C. Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Barkow was an associate at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans in Washington, D.C.