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In graduate school at Princeton University, wrote a paper on Anna Jones Robinson (1922), the first Black woman admitted to the New York State Bar—and one of the first two Black women to graduate from ������ Law. Because the Law School offered afternoon and evening classes to attract working students, Robinson could teach school in Harlem in the morning, attend afternoon law classes, and study and grade homework at night. “I admired [������ Law] for being at the forefront of opening legal education to women and minorities,” Seo says.

Seo, whose interdisciplinary work involves criminal law, criminal procedure, and legal history, joins ������ Law as a tenured professor this fall. Previously, she was the Michael I. Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. , Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law, praises Seo’s contributions to the study of criminal law. “I think her particular gift is for bringing alive the social implications of legal developments,” says Garland. “She is able to make her social legal research accessible and interesting to a general readership.”

“I think her particular gift is for bringing alive the social implications of legal developments,” says David Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law. “She is able to make her social legal research accessible and interesting to a general readership.”

Her first book, (Harvard University Press, 2019), was named one of the 10 best history books of its year by Smithsonian magazine and received the Order of the Coif Book Award and the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Prize. On one level a history of the Fourth Amendment in the 20th century, Policing the Open Road also examines how the automobile, a symbol of American freedom, led to pervasive police power.

“From working on my first book I learned how much the United States has used criminal law as a governance tool,” Seo says. “Crime and punishment haven’t been just about condemning immoral behavior. They were also used to ensure safe driving, which, tragically, enabled racialized policing.”

Her current book project on the history of federal conspiracy laws will continue these themes. “Conspiracy doctrines expanded to allow the government to do what it needed to do: collect taxes, enforce antitrust laws, and so on,” Seo explains, but again, with tragic results. By the late 20th century, charging conspiracy became a powerful prosecutorial tool in the War on Drugs.

Seo initially wanted to study international human rights law after writing her Princeton undergraduate thesis on the Korean comfort women movement. She is still interested in human rights. “The constitutional right to be secure in one’s person and home, for example, is also a human right,” she points out. After studying with several leading legal historians at Columbia Law, Seo ultimately decided to pursue a career in academia. She focused her studies on 20th-century American criminal justice following clerkships for Judge Denny Chin of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and Judge Reena Raggi of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where she encountered a federal criminal docket dominated by drug cases.

While obtaining her PhD in history at Princeton, Seo spent a year at ������ Law as a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History. “I’m forever grateful for the fellowship year, and now I’ll be able to pay it forward and mentor future legal historians coming through the program,” says Seo.

In addition to co-teaching the Legal History Colloquium, Seo will teach Criminal Law for 1Ls, which she did as a visiting professor in Fall 2024. She will also offer an upper-level course on Crime and Punishment in American History. 

“I’m excited to join cohorts of legal historians and criminal law scholars I’ve long admired,” Seo says, “and to be part of ������ Law’s proud tradition of innovative teaching and scholarship.” —Atticus Gannaway