Elena Hodges

Student Staff Editor

Originally from rural Montana, Elena Hodges (@ElenaRHodges) is a Student Staff Editor at Just Security and a second-year law student at NYU. Elena is part of NYU Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic and a staff editor for the Review of Law and Social Change. She was a research assistant as a 1L to Professor Philip Alston, during the final year of his mandate as UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Additionally, she is a co-organizer of the Database for Police Abolition (D4PA), now part of DefundPolice.org. This summer Elena will be an Ella Baker intern with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Elena holds a BA in Political Science from Yale University, where she was a Human Rights Scholar. Prior to law school, Elena gained extensive experience in community-based approaches to international human rights. She has worked on housing rights and police violence in Rio de Janeiro; migrant laborers’ rights in Jordan; and indigenous rights in the Brazilian Amazon. She also spent a year and a half in Beirut, Lebanon, where she directed research and advocacy for SAWA, a community-based NGO that supports Syrian refugees. Elena speaks Arabic, Italian, and Portuguese.