Sarah Cleveland | Columbia Law School

Sarah Cleveland

Faculty Co-Director, Human Rights Institute;
Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights

• Phone: (212) 854-2651
• Email:  [email protected]

Professor Sarah H. Cleveland is the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights, and Faculty Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University Law School in New York, where she teaches and writes in the areas of human rights, international law, national security and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations. She is a former Vice Chair and Member of the UN Human Rights Committee (2015-2018) and a former independent expert Member of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe (2010-2018). Cleveland is a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists, a Council Member of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law. Cleveland was Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States: Jurisdiction, Treaties, and Sovereign Immunity (2018). 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 helped supervise the office's legal work relating to human rights, counterterrorism, the law of armed conflict, and international justice. A former Rhodes Scholar and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Cleveland holds a baccalaureate degree from Brown University (1987), a master's degree from Oxford University (1989) and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1992).  She is an editorial board member of the International Review of the Red Cross and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. 

Cleveland has written widely on issues of international law, national security, and human rights, including co-authoring Louis Henkin’s Human Rights (Foundation Press, 2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013); Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Age of Connectivity, in Système de Protection des Droits de L’Homme des Nations Unies : Présent et Avenir (University of Paris Panthéon-Assas, 2017); Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties (Yale L. J. 2015); Embedded International Law and the Constitution Abroad (Colum. L. Rev. 2010); and Our International Constitution (Yale J. Int'l L. 2006).  Professor Cleveland has taught at the Harvard, Michigan, and University of Texas law schools; Oxford University, Sciences-Po University, the University Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the European University Institute, Florence.