Alison Siegler has been named the Lillian E. Kraemer Clinical Professor in Public Interest Law, effective July 1.

Siegler is the founding director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic (FCJC), the nation’s first legal clinic devoted to representing low-income clients charged with federal felonies. The clinic also pursues impact litigation in federal court and spearheads systemic change to combat mass incarceration and inequities in the federal criminal system. 

 Siegler is an expert on federal pretrial detention and the lead author of a groundbreaking study, Freedom Denied: How the Culture of Detention Created a Federal Jailing Crisis. She has testified before Congress and the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and her clinic’s contributions to innovative impact litigation earned Siegler the Seventh Circuit Bar Association’s Justice Stevens Award for Outstanding Public Service Work and earned the FCJC the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Award for Excellence. Siegler is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Her clinic’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and USA Today, and her students have gone on to work at over thirty public defender offices nationwide. 

 When she was hired in 2008, Siegler was the first woman on the UChicago faculty to run her own clinic in the law clinics’ 50-year history. Before founding the FCJC, Siegler served as a staff attorney with the Federal Defender Program in Chicago and a Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law Center’s Criminal Justice Clinic. She began her career as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman.  

Siegler is among a group of 26 UChicago faculty members who received named or distinguished serve professorships effective with the new academic year.