Catherine Powell

Catherine Powell (@ProfCatherine) is a professor at Fordham Law School, where she teaches constitutional law, human rights, and digital rights.  She is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and on the American Journal of International Law board of editors. Professor Powell took a leave from academia from 2009 to 2012 to serve in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Office and in the White House National Security Council as Director for Human Rights in the Obama Administration. She was founding director of both the Human Rights Institute and the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she was on the faculty as a clinical professor from 1998 to 2002.  Powell has also been a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School from 2012-2013 and at Columbia Law School in fall 2016 and spring 2007.

Recent media publications include How Women Could Save the World (The Nation), The New ‘Welfare Queen’: Donald Meet Ronald, Ronald Meet Donald (with Camille Gear Rich in Just Security), Gender, Masculinities and Counterterrorism (with Rebecca Turkington on CFR’s Women Around the World), Race and Rights in the Digital Age (in AJIL Unbound symposium on the UDHR at 70 and the Future of Being Human). Her current academic work focuses on federalism, equality law, human rights, and digital rights. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and obtained a master’s degree in public affairs at Princeton University from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.