Clinical Professor Alison Siegler, the founding director of the Law School’s Federal Criminal Justice Clinic, has been elected to the American Law Institute. She is one of 59 new members, including Kelsi Corkran, ’05; Jeffrey Mandell, ’06; and Michael Knoll, ’84 (also AB ’77, AM ’80, and PhD ’83).

The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. The ALI drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.

“This challenging year reminded us that ALI’s mission to protect the administration of justice and the rule of law is an ongoing one,” ALI President David F. Levi said. “I am proud to be a part of an organization that brings together people to discuss challenging topics in a courteous, informed, collegial, and productive way in an effort to find rules and solutions that work for everyone.”

Siegler founded the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic in 2008 to combat mass incarceration and address racial disparities in the federal system. It is the nation’s first legal clinic solely devoted to reforming the federal criminal system. The clinic defends indigent clients and pursues impact litigation in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and before the US Supreme Court.

The clinic’s groundbreaking fake stash house litigation, which illustrated a pattern of racial discrimination using a novel legal strategy, earned Siegler the Seventh Circuit Bar Association’s 2016 Justice Stevens Award for Outstanding Public Service Work and earned the FCJC the 2020 Clinical Legal Education Association Award for Excellence. Siegler is currently running a Federal Bailwatching Project aimed at reducing pretrial jailing and has testified before Congress about bail reform.

Siegler graduated magna cum laude from Yale College, earned a JD from Yale Law School, and holds an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center. Before joining the Law School, she served as an attorney with the Federal Defender Program in Chicago, a Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law Center’s Criminal Justice Clinic, and a law clerk for US District Judge Robert W. Gettleman.

Other Law School faculty who are members of ALI include Daniel Abebe, Douglas Baird, William Baude, Omri Ben-Shahar, Curtis A. Bradley, Emily Buss, Kenneth W. Dam, Frank H. Easterbrook, Richard H. Helmholz, Sarah M. Konsky, Thomas J. Miles, Eric A. Posner, Richard A. Posner, Geoffrey R. Stone, Lior Strahilevitz, David A. Strauss, David A. Weisbach, and Diane P. Wood.