Miriam Seifter

Professor of Law

Contact

miriam.seifter@wisc.edu
608/265-4771
975 Bascom Mall, 9111 Law Building, Madison, WI, USA, 53706-1399

Education

B.A., Yale University
M.Sc., University of Oxford
J.D., Harvard Law School

Biography

Miriam Seifter is a Professor of Law, Co-Director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, and Rowe Faculty Fellow in Regulatory Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her research addresses questions of state and federal public law, with a focus on challenges affecting democracy at the state level. She also teaches courses in Administrative Law, Property Law, and State and Local Government Law.

Professor Seifter's recent publications appear in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the NYU Law Review, among others. In 2017 and 2022, UW Law students honored Professor Seifter with the Classroom Teacher of the Year Award, and in 2018, she received one of twelve Distinguished Teaching Awards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For her article Gubernatorial Administration, Seifter was named the 2017 winner of the American Constitution Society's Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law. Her article Understanding State Agency Independence won the ABA's 2020 Award for Scholarship in Administrative Law. In 2024, Seifter received the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award from the American Constitution Society.

Professor Seifter received a B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University, an M.Sc. with distinction from Oxford University, and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the Environmental Fellow and an Articles Editor on the Harvard Law Review. After law school, she served as a law clerk for Chief Judge Merrick Garland on the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to joining the UW Law faculty, she was a Visiting Researcher and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and worked in private practice at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in San Francisco.

Scholarship & Publications

SSRN

Law Repository

Research Interests

Administrative Law
Federalism
Separation of Powers
State and Local Government Law

Activities

A work by Miriam Seifter, co-authored with Jessica Bulman-Pozen of Columbia Law School, was cited in a gerrymandering ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court. Check out their article on "The Democracy Principle in State Constitutions," in the Michigan Law Review.
Miriam Seifter and Jessica Bulman-Pozen describe the critical role of state courts in countering election subversion in a new article, "Countering the New Election Subversion: The Democracy Principle and the Role of State Courts." Read the paper.
Miriam Seifter discussed state institutions and democracy during the John Gedid Lecture Series hosted by Widener University Commonwealth Law School on April 7, 2022.
Miriam Seifter served as a commentator during the 2021 Jorde Symposium—The Third Founding: The Rise of Multiracial Democracy and the Authoritarian Reaction Against It on Nov. 4, 2021. The event was hosted by UC Berkeley School of Law. Watch the symposium.
Miriam Seifter co-organized a symposium on Judge Jeff Sutton's new book Who Decides? Seifter co-organized the event with Dan Rodriguez of Northwestern Law and co-authored a post on SLoG Blog with Jessica Bulman-Pozen.
Miriam Seifter presented during the Harvard Law School Law and Politics Workshop on Sept. 28, 2021.
Miriam Seifter served as commentor on Emily R. Chertoff's “Agency Noncompliance, Agency Culture, and Inferior Officer Discipline” during the 2021 Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable hosted by Yale Law School.
Miriam Seifter and Rob Yablon were panelists for "Meritorious RBG: The Legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg On and Off the Bench" at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association in May.
Miriam Seifter served as a panelist for the discussion "Federalism in the age of COVID-19" at the UVA Miller Center. A video of the panel is available.
Miriam Seifter participated on a web panel, “COVID, Federalism and Localism,” in October 2020. The panel was part of a virtual workshop series organized by Yale Law School’s Solomon Center for Health, Law and Policy to examine the pandemic’s intersections with, and disruptions to, many areas of law.
Miriam Seifter's new co-authored article, "The Democracy Principle in State Constitutional Law" (with Jessica Bulman-Pozen), is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review.
In May, Miriam Seifter spoke at “Federalism: Friend or Foe? Federal & State Authority to Fight COVID-19,” an event sponsored by the American Constitution Society.
The 2019 Wisconsin Law Review Symposium, which was chaired by former UW Law Professor Andrew Coan, featured a number of UW Law faculty, including Anuj Desai, Howie Erlanger, Neil Komesar, John Ohnesorge, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, David Schwartz, Miriam Seifter and Rob Yablon. The symposium, titled "Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Decision-Making,” was held Oct. 24 and 25.
Miriam Seifter's article, “Gubernatorial Administration,” was published in the Harvard Law Review in December 2017.
Miriam Seifter's article, "Further from the People? The Puzzle of State Administration," will appear in the April 2018 issue of the New York University Law Review.