Sarah Cleveland
Sarah Cleveland is the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights, and Faculty Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School. She is a noted expert in international law and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations, with particular interests in international and comparative human rights law, the status of international law in domestic law, international humanitarian law, and national security. In 2014, Cleveland was nominated by the United States and elected to serve a four-year term as an independent expert on the U.N. Human Rights Committee. She is the U.S. Member on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, and the Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement (Fourth) Foreign Relations Law of the United States.
From 2009 to 2011, Cleveland served as the Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she supervised the office's legal work relating to international human rights, international justice, and the law of armed conflict. She continues to serve as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law and is a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and a Council Member of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute.
Cleveland is currently co-director of the Project on Harmonizing Standards for Armed Conflict, and has been involved in human rights litigation in the United States and before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. A former Rhodes Scholar, Cleveland holds a baccalaureate degree from Brown University, a master's degree from Oxford University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and Judge Louis Oberdorfer on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2007, she previously taught at the Harvard, Michigan, and University of Texas law schools and at Oxford University.
Cleveland has written widely on issues of international law, human rights, and U.S. foreign relations law. She is a co-author of Louis Henkin's Human Rights casebook (2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013). Other scholarly writings include Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties (forthcoming Yale L. J. 2015); After Kiobel (J. Int’l Crim. Justice 2014); The Kiobel Presumption and Extraterritoriality, 52 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. 8 (2013); Embedded International Law and the Constitution Abroad (Colum. L. Rev. 2010); Our International Constitution (Yale J. Int'l L. 2006); Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power Over Foreign Affairs, (Texas L. Rev. 2002); Human Rights Sanctions and International Trade: A Theory of Compatibility (J. Int'l Econ. L. 2002); and Norm Internalization and U.S. Economic Sanctions, (Yale J. Int'l L., Winter 2001). She serves on the board of editors of the Journal of International Economic Law and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.