It is our great pleasure to introduce our new IntLawGrrls contributor Catherine Powell! Catherine is a professor at Fordham Law School, where she teaches international law, human rights, constitutional law, and comparative constitutional law.  She is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and was elected to the American Journal of International Law board of editors in 2015.  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.

Her recent publications include How Women Could Save the World, If Only We Would Let Them: From Gender Essentialism to Inclusive Security, 28 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 271 (forthcoming 2017); Gender Indicators as Global Governance: Not Your Father’s World Bank, chapter in Big Data, Big Challenges in Evidenced-Based Policy Making (Kumar Jayasuriya ed., 2015) (West Academic Press, Publisher) (reprinted in 17 Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 777 (2016)); Reflections on Zivotofsky v. Kerry: Presidential Signing Statements and Dialogic Constitutionalism, American Journal of International Law Unbound (2015); Libya: A Multilateral Constitutional Moment? American Journal of International Law (2012); and A Missed Opportunity to Lead by Example, New York Times, “Room for Debate on Have Treaties Gone Out of Style?” (2012).  Powell, who posts today on refugees and the new Executive Order, is also a frequent contributor to CFR’s blog, Women Around the World.

Heartfelt welcome!