Rate My Professor Nirej Sekhon

Nirej Sekhon is an Associate Professor of Law at the Georgia State University College of Law, where he joined as an Assistant Professor in 2009. His research focuses on the design and regulation of criminal justice institutions, particularly municipal policing and the roles of criminal courts and public defenders in influencing police practices. Sekhon writes at the intersection of law, sociology, and political theory, exploring the nature and function of modern policing in relation to crime, race, and poverty. He teaches Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure and is affiliated with the Center for Access to Justice. Sekhon earned a J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law in 2000, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as Associate Editor of the New York University Law Review. He holds A.B. degrees in Economics and Government from Cornell University, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with distinction and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Prior to his academic career, Sekhon clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from 2001 to 2002 and for Judge Carlos R. Moreno on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California from 2000 to 2001. He served as a staff attorney in the Misdemeanors Unit and Racial Disparity Project at The Defender Association in Seattle from 2002 to 2004, and as an associate at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco from 2004 to 2006, litigating employment, civil rights, and consumer cases on behalf of plaintiffs. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Law School Fellow at Stanford Law School, designing and teaching a legal writing course while conducting research on constitutional criminal procedure.

Sekhon's scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including "Police and the Limit of Law" in the Columbia Law Review (2019), "Dangerous Warrants" in the Washington Law Review (2018), "Catchall Policing and the Fourth Amendment" in the Duke Law Journal Online (2022), "Critical Legal Studies" in the Cardozo Law Review (2022), "Public Defenders and Collective Action" in the Florida State University Law Review (2025), "Purpose, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment" in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (2017), and "The Pedagogical Prosecutor" in the Seton Hall Law Review (2014). His honors include the Grey Fellowship at Stanford Law School and academic distinctions from NYU and Cornell. Sekhon has presented at faculty workshops, conferences such as LatCrit, and served as secretary of the Georgia State chapter of a legal honor society, inducting students in 2025.