Chi Adanna Mgbako

Chi Adanna Mgbako is clinical professor of law and director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School. She and her students work in partnership with grassroots social justice organizations, international organizations, foreign universities, and United Nations agencies on projects focusing primarily on gender equality, anti-carceral human rights advocacy, access to justice, and the rights of marginalized communities. She has conducted human rights fieldwork in Botswana, Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Japan, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, and the United States.

The clinic has engaged in numerous projects under Mgbako’s leadership, for example, successful petitions to United Nations human rights bodies documenting abuses against African sex workers and people in prison; human rights trainings on women and HIV/AIDS and female genital cutting; reports on police abuse of marginalized communities, employment discrimination against transgender people, and access to safe abortion; legal research for a successful lawsuit challenging the forced HIV testing of sex workers; mobile legal aid clinics in rural communities; global gender equality education campaigns; and jailhouse lawyers’ manuals.

Mgbako is the author of To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker Activism in Africa (New York University Press), which has become part of the sex work studies canon and is taught in universities across the country. Her scholarship has also appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change, Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, Georgetown Journal of International Law, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, among other publications. Her popular writing and scholar-activism have been featured in the New York Times International Edition, BBC News Focus on Africa, HuffPost, the Guardian, Yale Journal of International Affairs, and the Washington Post: Monkey Cage.

Mgbako earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she received the Gary Bellow Public Service Award, and her B.A., magna cum laude, from Columbia University. Following law school, she served as the Harvard Henigson Human Rights Fellow in the West Africa Project of the International Crisis Group, where she advocated for community-based models of justice in Liberia and political reform in Nigeria, and as the Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights at Fordham Law School, where she co-produced a documentary on women and HIV/AIDS in Malawi.

Mgbako has been honored as a New York Law Journal Rising Star, National Law Journal Top 40 Lawyer of Color Under 40, Fordham Law School’s Public Interest Faculty Member of the Year, and a recipient of the Police Reform Organizing Project’s Citizen of the City Award. She is also a recipient of the Association of American Law Schools’ M. Shanara Gilbert Award, one of the highest honors in clinical legal education.

Education

• Harvard Law School, JD, 2005
• Columbia University, BA, magna cum laude, 2001

Representative Publications

Books

To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker Activism in Africa, NYU Press (2016)

• Reviewed in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work, African Affairs, DiGeST: Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, Feminist Collections, Feminist Review, Human Rights Review, Human Rights Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Tits and Sass.

Articles, Book Chapters and Reviews, and Policy Reports