Before Rebecca Wexler Assisted at the Faculty of Law, she spent seven years as a documentary filmmaker, working as a researcher and associate producer on PBS documentaries and making educational films for a regional theater. She shot a film in Guinea for a museum installation and went to Sri Lanka as a Fulbright scholarship holder to work with post-war filmmakers in the Tamil region.
“It was a fascinating job. I met all kinds of people and learned the narration, ”she says.
When the Yale Law School hired him to teach documentary cinema to the students of his visual law project, Wexler was impressed by the students, who wanted to expose injustices through a film. “They worked on a film on Stop and Frisk and the expulsion of non-citizen veterans,” she says. “It was much more passionate and significant than what I was doing. I said to myself, “I want to do work like that. It was a completely transformative experience. »»
So Wexler applied and was accepted at the Yale Law School, where the course which most excited it as 1L was proof. “I have long been interested in truth, the representation and the production of knowledge,” explains Wexler, who studied the history of science and technology as the first cycle at Harvard and obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Boursière de Cambridge. “I was interested in philosophical debates on objectivity. When I thought about where these questions appear in the law, I realized that they would appear in evidence. And during my first day of lessons, I went to my teacher and told him that I also wanted to be a teacher of evidence. ”
“Privileges” proof
In Columbia Law, Wexler, who joined the faculty as a law professor on July 1, will teach a Law and technology seminar, as well as the upper year Evidence course. Its purse focuses on data, technology and secrecy in the criminal legal system. She wrote articles on these subjects, which have been published or that are to come in the Harvard Law Review,, Stanford law reviewAnd Michigan Law Review, Among other leading university journals. Wexler has also published OPE-EDS on the themes of his scholarship in The New York Times,, Los Angeles Times,, Washington monthlyAnd Slate.
One of the main concerns of his scholarship and his evidence class is the role of “privileges” in criminal cases. “Privileges are rules that allow people to retain evidence or keep things secret,” she says. “So, beyond your lawyer-client or your privileges for spouses, you have secret privileges of intellectual property. You have national security privileges, police privileges for surveillance technologies, and I spend more time to those in class than other teachers. ”
Wexler thinks that these types of privileges can have a deleterious effect on the application of justice. “Most rules of evidence have at least the appearance of the search for truth. There is a kind of justification that we let in and not that because we want precise decisions. But the privileges keep things secret and make decisions less precise, ”she says. “Privileges cause injustice. The innocent people suffer. The complainants are not due to them. And we agree with this because the secrets count more. I think it’s fascinating: why we make this choice as a company and which can make the choice and who benefits. ”
One of his first articles on privileges, “Secrets of life, freedom and trade: intellectual property in the criminal justice system“, Examine how technological developers often claim that the details on the functioning of their tools are privileged commercial secrets and refuse to disclose this information to criminal defendants and their lawyers; She maintains that “a privilege of the Secret Criminal Trade is anhistoric, harmful to defendants and useless to protect the interests of the secret holder”.
Wexler addressed the question of privilege from another angle in a UCLA law review article which introduced the phenomenon of “asymmetries of confidentiality”, which it defines as laws on privacy which allow the courts to order the disclosure of sensitive information when they are requested by the police, but not when requested by a lawyer for criminal defense. “Consequently, the statutes which selectively delete the defense surveys selectively suppress evidence of innocence,” she wrote. Wexler policy suggestion: Legislators writing the laws on privacy must ensure that the laws they adopt are symmetrical for investigators in the application of laws and defense.
The road to the academic world
After obtaining his law diploma, Wexler spent a year as a public interest scholarship holder at Legal Aid Society in his field of criminal defense practice. “Working for legal aid with extremely intelligent, well-trained and inspiring lawyers has been a deeply formative experience,” she says. “They devoted themselves to the use of their skills to protect people who had no other shield against potential unjustified convictions or extremely expensive and unjust penalties. For better or for worse, there is unfortunately so much bad with our criminal legal system that it is full of improvement opportunities, so it seemed to be a space where I could be useful. ” With legal aid, Wexler wrote an editorial: “When a computer program holds you in prison,” For The New York Timesprefiguring its academic scholarship.
Wexler was then used at the American Court of Appeal for the 2nd circuit and the American district court in the South District in New York. “The internships on appeal are the most traditional academic path, but I wanted to be a teacher of evidence, so I thought that I should spend time working in a court of first instance,” she says. “The district court was difficult work and we worked for long hours. I took three meals a day at my office for a year. ”
In 2019, Wexler joined the Faculty of the University of California in Berkeley, School of Law, where she taught evidence for six years and became co -director of the Faculty of her Center for Law and Technology (and later co -director of the Faculty of his Center for Criminal Law and Justice). In January 2023, she took on government service to work as a main political advisor at the Blank House and Technological Policy Office, where she helped implement the executive decree of President Joe Biden by advancing efficient and responsible police and criminal justice to improve public and public security. “It was an opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas on which I worked on the scholarship, in particular around the access of criminal defendants to information on surveillance and forensic technologies,” she says. Although President Donald Trump revoked the OS on his first day of power, Wexler says that the reports on which she worked – on which discussed The discovery, the recognition of the face and the cameras and records carried on the body – are available to the public.
In the fall of 2023, Wexler spent a semester in Columbia Law as a guest teacher; She is now delighted to be a full -time member of the faculty. “Columbia has so many leading thinkers in the legal university world today, people like Dan Richman working in criminal law and Dave Pozen, who was one of my heroes for her work on transparency,” she said. “It’s a place with so much learned excellence and excellent students.”
Wexler says she is also delighted to return to New York (where she lived from 2006 to 2012 and 2016 to 2019) with her partner, Bryan Pardo, computer teacher at the Northwestern University, and their two -year -old son. “We are going to live in West Harlem, and Bryan, who is a musician by playing, is delighted that we are at a distance from the walking club of Minton, the birthplace of Bebop,” she said. “I look forward to all the cultural opportunities in New York and I reconnect to my colleagues from the Legal Aid Society, which continues to inspire me. Two of them came to talk about my evidence class when I was a guest teacher here, and I plan to invite them. ”
For Wexler, his scholarship and his teaching never seemed more urgent. “Right now,” she says, “it’s more important than ever to protect the rights of the government.”