She earned a PhD at Oxford University in 1993 under the supervision of G. A. Cohen, and then a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1996.
[1] She is winner of the Fred Berger Memorial Prize in Philosophy of Law in 2002 for her widely cited article, "Paternalism, Unconscionability, and Accommodation".
[4] Shiffrin's recent work has primarily focused on freedom of speech, truth-telling, promising, and the place of the law in building moral character.
[6] She has pursued these themes predominately through her non-conventionalist account of promising, her controversial argument that contract law should be more sensitive to its relationship to the moral practice of promising, her critique of luck-egalitarian conceptions of egalitarianism as incompatible with liberal freedoms that require accommodation practices, and also through the development of her thinker-based theory of freedom of speech.
She is also cited for her critique of Lockean arguments for intellectual property, for her efforts to develop a non-comparative alternative theory of harm, and for her argument that the federal law authorizing exploitative penalty fees for minor breaches of credit card contracts violates constitutional due process guarantees against disproportionate punitive damages.