Michelle Zakarin - Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Legal Process

Dean for Academic Affairs beginning with the 2023-2024 academic year. Zakarin is a 1995 graduate of Touro Law and has been a Professor of Legal Process since 2003. She brings with her the institutional knowledge and acumen that will be instrumental as she works with and provides leadership to all members of the Touro community, including present and former students, faculty, and administration. Zakarin frequently presents on emerging issues related to legal writing, as well as in the cybercrime area. During her tenure as Associate Dean, she will continue her role in the classroom.

Dean Zakarin is an avid proponent of applying technology in the classroom. She is currently authoring a legal writing textbook utilizing Open Educational Resources (OER) that will be hosted on an online platform rather than published in a traditional hard copy format, allowing students and faculty to access materials at no cost. Zakarin is the recipient of both the American Legal Writing Directors Teaching Grant and the Touro University OER Fellowship, allowing her to continue her work in this area. She has also presented nationally on this topic for the Association of American Law Schools to introduce her work to fellow law professors and administrators. In addition, she authored a book chapter in Millennial Leadership in Law Schools. Her chapter, titled The Importance of Feedback, discusses, among other things, the use of technology to provide feedback. Dean Zakarin has served as the Co-chair of the Conference/Program Committee for the AALS Section on Technology Law and Education and she has presented at numerous academic conferences.

In addition to teaching legal process, in 2010 she proposed and developed the course Cybercrime which she has been teaching since its adoption. With an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, she combined her interest in technology with her interest in the law by creating this popular elective course. She has written and presented extensively on the intersection of technology and the law. Her latest article, published in 2022, Requiring What’s Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent and Revisiting Officer Inadvertence in Cyberlaw Cases, explores the way courts treat officer inadvertence as a necessity despite the United States Supreme Court ruling that no longer requires it in plain view searches. She has appeared on the Touro Law Center radio show, On the Docket, to discuss and answer questions about the United States Supreme Court case Riley v. California that held that cell phones found incident to a lawful arrest may not be searched without a warrant.