Rachel Barkow

She is a member of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office's Conviction Integrity Policy Advisory Panel, which advises the office on best practices and issues in the area of wrongful convictions. She has testified before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection regarding the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, before the United States Sentencing Commission making recommendations for reforming the federal sentencing system, and before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the future of the federal sentencing guidelines in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Blakely v. Washington.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

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.

On April 15, 2013, President Obama nominated Barkow to serve as a Commissioner on the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

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. She took a leave from the firm in 2001 to serve as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

In 1993, Barkow graduated from Northwestern University, 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.

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.