White Collar Support Group Tuesday Speaker Series:

Rachel Barkow

Law Professor, Lawyer, U.S. Supreme Court Law Clerk.

On Zoom, Feb. 4, 2025, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT. Start Here™.

Register Here Today!

We are extremely happy to have Rachel Barkow as our February White Collar Support Group Tuesday Speaker.

About Rachel Barkow:

Rachel is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law at NYU School of Law.  She also serves as the Faculty Director of the Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU.  She served as a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission from June 2013 to January 2019. She is the author of Prisoner of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration (Harvard/Belknap 2019).  She is recognized as one of the country’s leading experts on criminal law and policy. 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. 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.

Rachel's new book, Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration, is available for pre-order on Amazon HERE.

About Justice Abandoned:

"With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and a racially loaded drug war are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received remarkably little attention: the Supreme Court. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state’s power to lock people away. Yet since the 1960s the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. These rulings have been crucial to the meteoric rise in pretrial detention and coercive plea bargaining. They have enabled disproportionate sentencing and overcrowded prison conditions. And they have sanctioned innumerable police stops and widespread racial discrimination. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.

More than just an autopsy of the Supreme Court’s errors, Justice Abandoned offers a roadmap for change. Barkow shows that the originalist methodology adopted by the majority of the current Court demands overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration. If the justices genuinely believe in upholding the Constitution in all cases, then they have little choice but to reverse the wrongly decided precedents that have failed so many Americans."

Register Here Today!