Catherine Powell

Professor Catherine Powell,  the Eunice Hunton Carter Distinguished Research Scholar, is a leading expert on questions at the intersection of human rights and civil rights. She has served in the White House under both Presidents Obama and Harris. Her work focuses on matters concerning belonging and inclusion and how race, gender and poverty are used to roll back the rights of marginalized people.

She coined the term "Color of Covid." through a series of CNN op-eds and a Yale Journal of Law and Feminism law review article. Powell joined Fordham Law in 2003 and teaches constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties in a digital age, human rights, and feminist theory. She is the moderator of the Eunice Hunton Carter lecture series

• Eunice Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law, Fordham Law School 
• Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Women and Foreign Policy and Digital and Cyberspace Policy programs
• White House, Gender Policy Council (January-July 2024)
• White House National Security Staff, Director for Human Rights (May-November 2011 detail from State Department)
• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff Member (2009-2011, 2012)
• Served as Vice President Executive Council, American Society of International (ASIL) (2022-24)
• Served as Co-Chair, Blacks in ASIL (BASIL) (ASIL presidential appointment) (2020-23)
• Served on Board of Editors, American Journal of International Law (2015-2023)
• Affiliated Faculty, Center on Race, Justice and Law
• Affiliated Faculty, Leitner Center for International Law and Justice
• Visiting Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center (2012-2013) and Columbia Law (Spring 2007)
• Associate Clinical Professor and Founding Director, Human Rights Institute and Clinic, Columbia Law School (1998-02)
• Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund (1994-98)
• Law Clerk, Judge Leonard Sand, SDNY (1993-94)
• Ford Fellow in Public International Law, Harvard Law School (1992-93)
• Senior Editor, Yale Law Journal
• Principal Subjects: Constitutional Law; Human Rights; Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a Digital Age; Feminism, Race, and the Law

Education

• J.D. Yale Law School
• M.P.A. Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School Of Public And International Affairs
• B.A. Yale College

Representative Publications

The Implications of Section 230 for Black Communities, 66 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. __ (forthcoming Oct. 2024) (with Spencer Overton)

War on Covid: Warfare and its Discontents,  70 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 2 (2023)

Viral Convergence: Interconnected Pandemics as Portal to Racial Justice, chapter in Race and National Security (Oxford University Press 2023)

Pauli Murray: Human Rights Visionary and Trailblazer, 117 AJIL Unbound 37 (2023) (with Darin Johnson)

Overview for Can You Hear Me? Speech and Power in the Global Digital Town Square panel, in Proceedings of the 115^th Annual Meeting of the 2022 American Society of International Law (2023)

Afrofuturism Blues in an Age of Racial Innocence, Balkinization book symposium on Tanya K. Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (2022)

Introduction to the Symposium on Feminist Approaches to International Law Thirty Years on: Still Alienating Oscar?,  116 AJIL Unbound 259 (2022) (with Adrien Wing, with whom I co-edited the symposium)

Color of Covid and Gender of Covid: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People , 33 YALE J.L. & Feminism  1 (2021) (coining “Color of Covid” and "Gender of Covid"), reprinted in Daniela Kraiem, Anibal Rosario Lebron, and Jamie R. Abrams, Women and the Law (Thomson Reuters 2022 edition)

Interlocking Pandemics, Introduction Remarks for “COVID‐19: Understanding the Disparate Impact on Marginalized Communities” panel, in Proceedings of the 113^th Annual Meeting of the 2020 American Society of International Law (2021)

The “Welfare Queen” Goes to the Polls: Race-Based Fractures in Gender Politics and Opportunities for Intersectional Coalitions, Geo. L.J. 19th Amend. Special Edition 105 (2020) (with Camille Gear Rich)

Race, Gender, and Nation in an Age of Shifting Borders, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs (2020)

We the People: These United Divided States, 40 Cardozo Law Review (2019)

Race and Rights in the Digital Age, 112 Am. J. Int'l L. Unbound 339 (2018)

How Women Could Save the World, If Only We Would Let Them: From Gender Essentialism to Inclusive Security,28 Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 271 (2017)

Gender Indicators as Global Governance: Not Your Father's World Bank, 17 Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 777 (2016), reprinting chapter in Big Data, Big Challenges in Evidenced-Based Policy Making (Kumar Jayasuriya ed., 2015) (West Academic Press, Publisher)

Up from Marriage: Freedom, Solitude, and Individual Autonomy in the Shadow of Marriage Equality, 84 Fordham L. Rev. 69 (2015)

Agora: Reflections on Zivotofksy v. Kerry: Presidential Signing Statements and Dialogic Constitutionalism, 109 Am. J. Intl L. Unbound 51 (2015)