Catherine Powell

Professor Catherine Powell is a leading expert on questions of human rights and equality theory. She has worked on these matters in the White House under both Presidents Obama and Biden as well as on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department Policy Planning Staff. Her current work focuses on how the digital economy is restructuring our relationships with each other, with the state, and even with ourselves (in how we perform and express ourselves online) and the implications of this for law. More broadly, her work explores matters concerning equality law, belonging, and inclusion.

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. Previously, Professor Powell was on the Columbia Law School faculty, where she was a clinical professor as founding director of the Human Rights Clinic and the Human Rights Institute. At Fordham Law, she teaches constitutional law, human rights, feminist theory, and civil rights in a digital age. She has also served on various boards, including the Human Rights Watch board of directors and the American Journal of International Law board of editors. Other previous leadership positions include her roles as Vice President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and co-chair of Blacks in ASIL (BASIL). She is the Eunice Hunton Carter Distinguished Research Scholar and moderator of a lecture series named after Eunice Carter.

• Princeton University, Program in Law & Public Policy, Crane Fellow (2025-2026)
• Constitutional Accountability Center, Scholars-in-Residence (2025-2026)   
• Eunice Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law, Fordham Law School 
• AALS Section on Minority Groups Clyde Ferguson Award Recipient (2026)
• 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)
• Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Women and Foreign Policy and Digital and Cyberspace Policy programs
• Principal Subjects: Constitutional Law; Human Rights; Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a Digital Age; Feminism, Race, and the Law

Earlier Experience

• Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• Law Clerk, Judge Leonard Sand, SDNY
• Ford Fellow in Public International Law, Harvard Law School
• Senior Editor, Yale Law Journal

Education

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

Representative Publications

How AI Recreates Caste: Creating and Amplifying Systemic Inequality, 85 Md. L. Rev. 243 (2025)

The Implications of Section 230 for Black Communities, 66 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. (2024) (co-authored 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)