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Expert Bio
Catherine Powell is an adjunct senior fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties in a digital age, human rights, and comparative constitutional law. Her prior experience includes stints in former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning office and in the White House National Security Council as director for human rights in the Barack Obama administration. Previously, Powell was founding director of the Human Rights Institute and the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she was on the faculty as a clinical professor.
Powell currently is a member of the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) board of editors and is a vice president of the American Society of International Law. In addition to formerly serving on the Human Rights Watch board, she has been a consultant on national security and human rights matters for the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society as well as a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center (between 2012 and 2013) and Columbia Law School (spring 2007 and fall 2016).
She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal. She has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. After her graduate work, she was a post-graduate Ford fellow in teaching international law at Harvard Law School and then clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand on the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.
Powell’s recent blogs and op-eds include “Invisible Workers on the Global Assembly Line: Behind the Screen” in Women Around the World and cross-posted in Balkinization and Net Politics (2019), “The United Divided States: San Francisco Sues Donald Trump for Sanctuary Cities Order” in Just Security (2017), “How #MeToo Has Spread Like Wildfire” in Newsweek (2017), “How Women Could Save the World” in the Nation (2017), and “A Missed Opportunity to Lead by Example” in the New York Times (2012).
Her recent academic publications include “We the People: These United Divided States” in Cardozo Law Review (2019), “How Women Could Save the World, If Only We Would Let Them: From Gender Essentialism to Inclusive Security” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2017), and “Gender Indicators as Global Governance: Not Your Father's World Bank” in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law (2016). Shorter essays include “Race and Rights in the Digital Age” in AJIL Unbound (2018), “Agora: Reflections on Zivotofsky v. Kerry: Presidential Signing Statements and Dialogic Constitutionalism” in AJIL Unbound (2015), and “Libya: A Multilateral Constitutional Moment?” in the American Journal of International Law (2012).
Affiliations:
- American Journal of International Law, board of editors
- American Society of International Law, member of executive council
- Fordham Law School, professor of law
Current Projects
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Elon Musk's plans to buy Twitter have led to renewed discussions on free speech. But much of the debate has neglected the international reach of social media companies—and its legal implications.
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Social media can be a powerful tool for digital activists—and for the governments trying to silence them.
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Social media can be a powerful tool for digital activists—and for the governments trying to silence them.
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Dr. Safiya Noble, who spoke at a CFR roundtable in 2018, was announced as a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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Dr. Mary Gray revealed the hidden realities of the overlooked and undervalued workers driving our economy through their labor—what Gray calls “ghost work.”
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Dr. Mary Gray revealed the hidden realities of the overlooked and undervalued workers driving our economy through their labor—what Gray calls “ghost work.”
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At a CFR roundtable, Catharine A. MacKinnon discussed the impacts of COVID-19 on those in the sex industry as well as where the international debate on prostitution and sex trafficking currently stands.
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A stronger economy can be achieved by placing women, especially women of color, at the center of legislative framework.
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One year after coining “Color of Covid,” Catherine Powell published an op-ed on CNN.com about the ongoing pandemics of race and gender inequality, particularly the disparate impacts of COVID-19 on the labor market. In the article, she makes recommendations for the Biden administration in addressing the twin health and economic crises.
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In this piece (which is part of a special Just Security “Racing National Security” symposium), Catherine Powell argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a window into the pandemics of policing, poverty, and racism around the globe. National security observers need to broaden the lens for analysis beyond military security—and what Trump today (and Nixon in the 1970s) opportunistically calls “law and order”—to encompass economic, physical, and human security.
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In what Catherine Powell calls the "color of Covid," the pandemic has highlighted a range of underlying inequalities on race—including on the job front—now exacerbated by the health crisis and the emerging stay-at-home economy.
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The rapid spread of the coronavirus in the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a new reality for most—if not all—Americans, as a growing number of U.S. states have imposed a variety of stay-at-home directives. This grand experiment provides an opportunity for comparative analysis.
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In her newly published book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Dr. Sarah T. Roberts discusses the world of content moderation, which increasingly plays a major role in keeping social media firms functioning.
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In her new book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Dr. Sarah T. Roberts reveals the inner workings of the world of content moderation on social media platforms.
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Senior Fellow Catherine Powell reposts two pieces on conflict-related sexual violence.
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Cryptocurrencies have the potential to radically alter the world's financial systems. But could they also upend inequality?
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Adjunct Senior Fellow Catherine Powell presided over a CFR roundtable, “Bringing a Gender Lens to Immigration: Domestic Violence–Based Asylum and Family Separation” with Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project, and Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.
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In addressing legal barriers and challenging entrenched gender stereotypes, Japan is pushing for gender equality in the workplace and growing its economy.
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Terrorism and Counterterrorism
A growing body of research has made the case that counter-terrorism and CVE would benefit from a more nuanced gender lens. What remains under-studied—and generally absent from policy discussions—is whether the growing attentiveness to gender might also include a greater focus on masculinities. -
During a recent CFR roundtable, Professor Safiya Noble spoke about digital human rights – an issue on which she is advising the United Nations. Dr. Noble explores the biases against women and people of color that are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.
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Senior Fellow Catherine Powell hosted a roundtable discussion with Muneer Ahmad, a leading voice and scholar on immigrant rights, on strategies for litigating the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
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Eighteen states and the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief in support of a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s new policy that denies asylum to applicants fleeing domestic or gang violence.The policy hits women and children—the most common survivors of domestic abuse—particularly hard.
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This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to Nadia Murad, a survivor—and activist for other survivors—of sex trafficking by the Islamic State group, and Denis Mukwege, a gynecological surgeon from the Congo in recognition of their work “to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.” It is heartening that Mukwege and Murad are receiving the recognition that their work deserves. Let us hope that this publicity will turn into action.
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The Trump administration announced intentions to lower the refugee ceiling in fiscal year 2019, a change that would disproportionately affect women and children, who represented 72 percent of refugees in 2016.