Nirej Sekhon
Associate Professor of Law Center for Access to Justice- Education
J.D., New York University School of Law
A.B., Cornell University
- Specializations
Criminal Procedure (Investigation & Adjudication)
Criminal Law
Police Regulation
- Biography
Professor Sekhon studies the design and regulation of criminal justice institutions. Writing at the intersection of law, sociology, and political theory, Sekhon’s recent work has focused on municipal policing and how criminal courts and public defenders can play more active roles in shaping police practices. Sekhon’s scholarship explores the nature and function of modern policing with the aim of understanding its relationships to crime, race, and poverty. His most recent articles appear in the Columbia Law Review and the Ohio State Law Journal.
Immediately prior to joining Georgia State University, Sekhon was a Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School. Sekhon’s professional experience included stints in both criminal defense and plaintiffs-side practices. Sekhon served as a judicial clerk to Judge M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Judge Carlos Moreno on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
Sekhon is a graduate magna cum laude of New York University School of Law where he was made a member of the Order of the Coif.
- Publications
Police and the Limit of Law, 119 Columbia L. Rev. – – (forthcoming) (arguing the police wield a form of “sovereign power” that is not subject to legality-based restraint).
Representative Defendants 81 Ohio St. L. Rev. – – (forthcoming) (arguing that, contrary to conventional wisdom, criminal defendants play a central role representing third party interests).
The Chokehold, 57 Louisville L. Rev. 43 (2019) (symposium) (reviewing Paul Butler, Chokehold (2017)).
The Second Amendment in the Street, 112 Northwestern U. L. Rev. Online 271 (2018) (arguing that Fourth Amendment creates considerable latitude for police to evade Second Amendment’s implications for gun interdiction in poor minority communities).
Dangerous Warrants, 93 Wash. L. Rev. 967 (2018) (arguing that non-compliance warrants are a distinct type of warrant that create unique constitutional and extra-constitutional harms).
Mass Suppression: Aggregation and the Fourth Amendment, 51 Ga. L. Rev. 429 (2017) (arguing that crimina courts should permit different defendants to aggregate suppression motions in order to challenge patterns of unconstitutional police conduct) (reprinted at 45 Search & Seizure L. Rep. 57 (2018)).
Purpose, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment 107 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 65 (2017) (arguing that the structure for analyzing state purpose in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is currently underdeveloped, but could be a basis for a robust regulation of enforcement bureaucracies’ institutional design).
Blue on Black: An Empirical Assessment of Police Shootings, 54 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 189 (2016) (analyzing259 officer-involved shootings that occurred between 2006 and 2014 in Chicago).
Punitive Injunctions, 17 U. Pa. J. L. & Soc. Change 175 (2014) (arguing that probation and child support orders among other judicial orders are “punitive injunctions” and proposing restrictions on courts’ power to impose them).
The Pedagogical Prosecutor, 44 Seton Hall L. Rev.1 (2014) (arguing that prosecutors have a duty to use their unique expressive power to advance liberal, public dialogue).
Complementarity and Post-Coloniality, 27 Emory Int’l L. Rev. 799 (2013) (symposium) (arguing that political, economic, and social realities in post-colonial states present significant challenges to the International Criminal Court’s ability to promote domestic prosecutions of international criminal law violations).
Redistributive Policing, 101 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1171 (2011) (arguing for the regulation of police departments’ arrest policy based on principles of distributive justice).
Docile Defendants and Willing Suspects: The Contradictory Role of Consent in Criminal Procedure, 46 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 103 (2011) (using political theory to argue that the criminal justice system relies on a tenuous notion of consent to rationalize waiver of constitutional rights).
Equality and Identity Hierarchy, 3 N.Y.U. J. L. & Liberty 349 (2008) (arguing that Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence assumes the primacy of civic identity over other kinds of identities).
A Birthright Rearticulated: The Politics of Bilingual Education, 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1407 (1999) (arguing against California law restricting bilingual education).