Professor Catherine Powell has been elected to the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, the preeminent journal housed at the American Society of International Law.
Published quarterly since 1907, AJIL (and now its online companion, AJIL Unbound) is a resource for developments in international law, including decisions by national, regional, and international courts and tribunals, as well as contemporary U.S. practice in international law.
Powell is an Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law. Her principal subjects are international law, constitutional law, human rights, and comparative law. She is affiliated with Fordham’s Leitner Center for International Law and Justice and recently helped the Law School launch a new International, Comparative, and Foreign Law Concentration.
Beginning in 2009, she took leave from Fordham Law for work on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff and for a stint on the White House National Security Staff as Director for Human Rights.
“It’s such an honor to be elected to AJIL,” said Powell, who published a 2012 commentary in AJIL on the NATO-led intervention in Libya, following her time in government, where she had a front-seat in observing – and participating in – the development of the U.S. government’s response to the Arab Spring.
Powell’s scholarship has been published in numerous law journals, and she has written opinion pieces in a variety of news outlets, including the New York Times and Ms. magazine. She is also a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where she regularly blogs and hosts roundtables on gender and national security matters.
Before joining Fordham, Powell was a clinical professor and the founding executive director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School, served as assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, clerked for Judge Leonard Sand of the Southern District of New York, and was a Ford Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School.
Powell is a graduate of Yale Law School, and she holds a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University and B.A. from Yale College.