Rachel Barkow

Rachel Elise Barkow (née Selinfreund; born 1971) is an American professor of law at the New York University School of Law. She is also faculty director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law. Her scholarship focuses on administrative and criminal law, and she is especially interested in applying the lessons and theory of administrative law to the administration of criminal justice. In 2007, Barkow won the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU. In the fall of 2008, she served as the Beneficial Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In 2025, Barkow released a book titled Justice Abandoned which highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration in the United States.

Education and clerkships

In 1993, Barkow graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and psychology and was inducted as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1996, she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Barkow won the Sears Prize (awarded to the top two grade point averages in the first year of law school), and served on the Harvard Law Review.

She clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia at the U.S. Supreme Court, according to one report serving as the "counter-clerk"—the nickname given to the Democrat he hires to sniff out political biases in his arguments.

Legal career

Barkow was an associate at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans in Washington, D.C., from 1998–2002, where she focused on telecommunications and administrative law issues in proceedings before the FCC, state regulatory agencies, and federal and state courts.