Cynthia Soohoo is the Director of the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at CUNY Law School. She is in expert in women’s human rights and human rights advocacy in the United States. She supervises the clinic’s work on reproductive rights and health, trafficking, and youth in the adult criminal justice system.

Prior to CUNY, Professor Soohoo was the Director of the U.S. Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. In addition to managing U.S. litigation and state advocacy work, she spearheaded and supervised the development of the Center’s U.S. human rights advocacy and fact-finding work and the growth of its Law School Initiative. From 2001-2007, Ms. Soohoo was the Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School, and a supervising attorney for the law school’s Human Rights Clinic. She has worked on U.S. human rights issues before U.N. human rights bodies, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, and in domestic courts.

Prof. Soohoo practiced law at the firm Covington & Burling for six years and was co-counsel in the landmark Alien Tort Statute case, Doe v. Karadzic. She was a founding board member for the U.S. Human Rights Network and currently serves as its board chair. She served as co-chair of the American Constitutional Society’s Working Group on International Law and the Constitution and as a member of the national board of Law Students for Reproductive Justice. She is the author of several articles on women’s human rights and human rights advocacy in the United States. She was a co-editor and contributor to BRINGING HUMAN RIGHTS HOME, a three-volume book on human rights in the United States, which received the 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award.

Prof. Soohoo is a cum laude graduate of Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was an editor of the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. She is a former law clerk to the Hon. Gerard L. Goettel, U.S.D.J., S.D.N.Y.

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