Rachel Cicurel

Rachel Cicurel is a clinical lecturer in law and criminal legal system advocacy fellow at Yale Law School. Prior to joining Yale, she was a supervising attorney in the Trial Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS), where she spent 10 years representing indigent children and adults charged with felony crimes in D.C. Her work challenging Violence Risk Assessments under Daubert to preclude use at juvenile sentencing was profiled by The Atlantic. 

Cicurel co-created the Youth Justice Division of the Access to Justice Clinic at the George Washington University Law School, where she was a professorial lecturer in law and co-taught the clinic during the 2025–2026 academic year.

Cicurel attended Georgetown University Law Center as an evening student before becoming a trial attorney at PDS in 2016. Prior to law school, she worked at the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project following her graduation from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.