Rachel López

Guest Author

Rachel López (@Rachel_E_Lopez) is an Associate Professor of Law and was recently named as an Inaugural Dean’s Research Fellow at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University. She is also currently a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has also held visiting research fellowships at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge, the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. In 2016, Professor López researched transitional justice in Guatemala and Spain as a Fulbright Scholar. From 2015 to 2019, she served as a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission, as an appointee of Governor Tom Wolf.

Her scholarship primarily focuses on state responsibility for mass abuse, transitional justice, and the carceral state and has appeared in well-regarded law journals, such as the Northwestern Law Review, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, and University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law. Her work has also been featured in The Hill, Americas Quarterly, Opinio Juris, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bloomberg Law, and Open Global Rights. She has been invited to give testimony as an expert on human rights before the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Philadelphia City Council.

Professor López received her B.A. in Sociology, Political Science, and International Studies from Northwestern University and her J.D. from the University of Texas, School of Law. She also has an LL.M. in French and European Law from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.