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.