Rebecca Shaeffer

Rebecca Shaeffer is Professorial Lecturer in Law in the Access to Justice Clinic: Prisoner Advocacy. She currently works as Staff Attorney for Criminal Systems and Institutions at the National Disability Rights Network, where she provides technical support and training for 57 state and territorial protection and advocacy agencies in their federal mandate to monitor, investigate and litigate rights abuses against people with disabilities in carceral and forensic facilities.

Ms. Shaeffer has also been Legal Director of Fair Trials International, where she led criminal justice reform advocacy in Europe, the US, and Latin America, a fellow in the Health and Human Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, and a federal death penalty defense investigator. She served on the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section’s Task Force on Plea Bargaining, and on the international steering committee, led by former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez, that led to the first international legal guidance on police interrogation – the Méndez Principles. She currently serves on the steering committee for the biennial Prison Law and Advocacy Conference and sits on the advisory board of the Plea Bargaining Institute.

Ms. Shaeffer has a JD (cum laude) from Georgetown University Law Center with a certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies, where she helped to found the Human Rights Institute and served as its first Student Director, and won the Bettina Pruckmayr Award for Human Rights, and a BA (cum laude) in Comparative Literature from Smith College.