Miriam E. Rocah

Adjunct Professor of Law

Miriam E. Rocah (Mimi) was elected as District Attorney of Westchester County, New York in November 2020. During her four years as DA, she modernized the DA’s Office, aggressively pursued gun and violent crime, developed ways to better serve crime victims, and instituted sensible criminal justice reforms.

Prior to becoming DA, Ms. Rocah served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) for nearly 17 years from 2001-2017. As an AUSA, she was prosecuted cases involving violent crime, organized crime, human trafficking, sex trafficking, child exploitation, frauds and public corruption.

In 2012, she was appointed as Chief of the SDNY’s Westchester Division, a position she held for five years. In that position, she served as the primary liaison with law enforcement agencies and other prosecutorial offices in the Northern Counties and coordinated and co-chaired multi-county task forces on public health and safety issues like sex trafficking and the opioid overdose epidemic.

Before running for office, Ms. Rocah was a Distinguished Fellow in Criminal Justice at Pace University School of Law and an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School. Ms. Rocah has been a frequent commentator on MSNBC, NBC News, CNN, and numerous podcasts on topics relating to law, justice and women’s issues and has written and published dozens of opinion pieces on those topics.

Education

Ms. Rocah graduated with a B.A. in American History from Harvard University in 1992 magna cum laude and from New York University School of Law in 1997 magna cum laude and a member of the Order of the Coif. She clerked for Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and Judge Chester J. Straub of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She was also a litigation associate at the law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore.