Rachel Harmon

Rachel Harmon is the Harrison Robertson Professor of Law and directs the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of Virginia School of Law. She is one of the nation’s leading scholars on policing and the law, a field of study she helped create.

Harmon’s academic writing considers how law influences police practices and how federal, state and local law can make policing more effective, fairer and less harmful. Her casebook, “The Law of the Police” (2nd ed. 2024), is the first to survey the law governing police encounters, and her articles on policing have appeared in criminology and legal theory journals, as well as law reviews. At UVA Law, she teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure and policing law.

From 2023 to 2024, Harmon served as senior policy adviser for criminal justice for the White House Domestic Policy Council. In 2023, Harmon won Virginia’s highest honor for faculty at public and private colleges and universities, the Outstanding Faculty Award, for superior accomplishment in teaching, research and public service.  She also won UVA’s Outstanding Researcher Award. In 2022, Harmon received the UVA All-University Teaching Award. Harmon is an elected member of the American Law Institute and served as associate reporter for ALI’s project on Principles of the Law of Policing. She advises nonprofits and government actors on policing and the law and served as a law enforcement expert for the “Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

Before becoming a professor, Harmon spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. At the Civil Rights Division, Harmon investigated and prosecuted civil rights crimes nationwide, including cases of excessive force and sexual violence by police officers. Earlier, she served as a law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. Harmon is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; she received two master’s degrees with distinction from the London School of Economics as a British Marshall Scholar; and she earned her law degree from Yale Law School.