Seema Saifee

Seema T. Saifee researches and writes about criminal law, criminal procedure, and social change.  Her scholarship explores how individuals and communities most harmed by mass incarceration produce knowledge and develop strategies to reduce prison populations.  Before joining Rutgers Law, she was a Quattrone Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Before entering academia, Professor Saifee was a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project in New York, where she represented indigent clients in post-conviction criminal cases in state and federal courts nationwide, while teaching classes in and directing the Innocence Project Clinic.  She previously worked as a legal fellow at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, where she litigated cases at the intersection of national security, civil liberties, policing, and immigration.  Professor Saifee began her career as an associate at a New York law firm, where she was part of a pro bono team that represented a group of ethnic Uighur men in federal habeas litigation and non-litigation advocacy to challenge their indefinite imprisonment without charge in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  Professor Saifee clerked for the Honorable Dan A. Polster of the Northern District of Ohio.  She is a cum laude graduate of Cornell University and a graduate of Fordham Law School, where she was a Stein Scholar in Public Interest Law and Ethics and a Crowley Scholar in International Human Rights.  

Publications:

• Decarceration's Inside Partners, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4066010

• Slate article, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/green-haven-think-tank-history-invest-divest-prison-study.html

• Sustaining Lawyers, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4076310

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• University of Denver Law School, presenting paper

• Arizona State Law School, presenting paper

• Drexel Law School, symposium on participatory legal scholarship alongside people formerly incarcerated

Previous Organizations: 

• University of Pennsylvania

• Innocence Project

• ACLU of PA

Accomplishments:

• Obtaining exoneration of wrongly convicted people

• Representing men unlawfully imprisoned in Guantanamo

• Winning lawsuit for man unlawfully detained based on violation of constitutional rights and racial discrimination

Upcoming Projects:

• Law review article (in progress) about people at the bottom uncovering systemic problems in criminal system that can address structural inequities

My work is part of a long tradition that centers the concepts and visions of Black and Latinx people for transformative social change. I bring to this tradition a specific focus on ideas and strategies to reduce criminal punishment conceptualized by people in prison, during their confinement. This focus brings new frameworks for empirical knowledge that can lead to more innovative and humane decarceral strategies. Overall, my research aims to contribute to a disruption of conventional understandings of criminal law and procedure by introducing new ways of thinking about criminal punishment that can open up paths to reduce violence and urban poverty, and by re-framing criminal law and procedure to attend to the structural inequalities that undergird the criminal process.