Michelle Zakarin - Assistant Professor of Law

Professor Michelle Zakarin has been teaching at Touro Law since 2003 and currently teaches Contracts I, Contracts II, and Business Organizations. With an undergraduate degree in computer science, she has maintained a longstanding interest in technology, cyberlaw, and the ways in which emerging technologies affect legal doctrine and legal education. Her scholarship and presentations reflect these interests, particularly at the intersection of contract law and cyberlaw.

Professor Zakarin also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2023-2026, a role in which she worked closely with faculty, students, and members of the law school administration while continuing to teach. Her administrative responsibilities included a broad range of academic and student-related matters, and the position gave her the opportunity to contribute to the law school both inside and outside the classroom.

Before moving primarily into doctrinal teaching, Professor Zakarin taught Legal Process at Touro. And as a strong proponent of incorporating technology into legal education, Professor Zakarin authored a legal writing textbook using Open Educational Resources (OER). Hosted on an online platform rather than published in a traditional hard-copy format, the textbook provides students and faculty with free access to course materials. Her work in this area has been recognized with both an American Legal Writing Directors Teaching Grant and a Touro University OER Fellowship. She has also presented nationally through the Association of American Law Schools, sharing her work with law faculty and administrators interested in innovative approaches to legal education.

Professor Zakarin's scholarship reflects her longstanding interest in the relationship between law and technology. Her most recent published article, Requiring What’s Not Required: Circuit Courts Are Disregarding Supreme Court Precedent and Revisiting Officer Inadvertence in Cyberlaw Cases (Charleston Law Review 2022), examines the continued reliance by some courts on officer inadvertence in plain-view searches despite Supreme Court precedent eliminating inadvertence as a constitutional requirement.

Her current scholarly project, The Clickbait Economy of Assent, turns to the intersection of contract doctrine and the modern digital marketplace. The project examines how consumer digital form agreements challenge traditional principles of assent, the duty to read, unconscionability, and capacity, with particular attention to online design practices, standardized terms, and agreements involving minors. Through this work, Professor Zakarin continues to explore how longstanding legal doctrines operate in rapidly evolving technological environments.