Fordham Law School Center on Race, Law and Justice and the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice

Black Lives Matter: Protest, Police Violence, and the Pandemic

Catherine Powell is a Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where she teaches international law, human rights, constitutional law, and comparative law. Professor Powell is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her prior experience includes stints in President Obama’s White House National Security Council as Director for Human Rights as well as in Secretary of State Clinton’s Policy Planning Office. Earlier, Powell was the Founding Director of both the Human Rights Institute and the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she was on the faculty as a clinical professor. In addition to being a former member of 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 School of Law (2012-2013) and Columbia Law School (spring 2007 and fall 2016). Powell received a BA from Yale College, an MPA from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in Public and International Affairs, and a JD from Yale Law School. She also completed a Post-Graduate Ford Fellowship in Public International Law at Harvard Law School.

Gay McDougall is a distinguished scholar in residence at Leitner Center for International Law and Justice and the Center on Race, Law and Justice at Fordham University School of Law. Gay McDougall was a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Award for her work in pursuit of global human rights and in 2015 the Government of South Africa bestowed on her their national medal of honor for non-citizens, the Order of O.R.Tambo Medal for her extraordinary contributions to ending apartheid. She served as a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination and was the first UN Independent Expert on Minority Issues. For 14 years, she was executive director of Global Rights, which worked with human rights advocates in 10 countries around the world to develop their strategies for justice. Prior to that she played a special role in securing the release of thousands of political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. She was then appointed to the electoral commission that in 1994 ran the first democratic elections in South Africa that ended apartheid and installed Nelson Mandela as president. She earned a JD at Yale Law School, an LLM in public international law at the London School of Economics and Politics, and a BA in social science at Bennington College.  She has honorary Doctor of Law degrees from six universities including the University to Witwatersrand (South Africa).

Bennett Capers is the Stanley A. August Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches Evidence, Criminal Procedure, and Criminal Law. His academic interests include the relationship between race, gender, technology, and criminal justice, and he is a prolific writer on these topics. His articles and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the California Law Review (twice), Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (twice), New York University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others, and he is co-editing the forthcoming book Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and Law (Cambridge University Press) (with Devon Carbado, Robin Lenhardt, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig).  His commentary and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times and other journals.  He has been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, University of Texas Law School, and Boston University Law School.