Sarah Cleveland
Professor Sarah Cleveland is a noted expert in international and comparative human rights law. In 2014, she 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 Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, and the U.S. Member on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. 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 the law of war, counterterrorism, and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and assisted with its international human rights and international justice work. 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. 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, including co-authoring Louis Henkin’s Human Rights casebook (2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013).