Sarah H. Cleveland
Legal Adviser of the Department of State
Assuming office
TBD
PresidentJoe Biden
SecretaryAntony Blinken
SucceedingRichard C. Visek (acting)
Personal details
NationalityAmerican
Alma materBrown University (BA)
Lincoln College, Oxford (MSt)
Yale University (JD)
OccupationLaw professor
Known forExpert on international law

Sarah Hull Cleveland is an American law professor and expert in international law and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations, with particular interests in the status of international law in U.S. domestic law, international and comparative human rights law, international humanitarian law, and national security. In August 2022, she was selected to run for election as a judge on the International Court of Justice in the 2023 ICJ election. Her nomination to the court has been supported by the National Groups of over 50 states.[1]

Cleveland is the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights at Columbia Law School.[2] In 2014, she was nominated by the United States and elected to serve a four-year term as an independent expert on the United Nations Human Rights Committee, where she served as Vice Chair. She was the Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute's project on the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, and the U.S. Member on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe.

Education and judicial clerkships

Cleveland was awarded an A.B. with honors at Brown University in 1987 (Junior Phi Beta Kappa); an M.St. from Lincoln College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), in 1989; and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1992.

Immediately after law school, she clerked for Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and then for Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1993-1994 Term.

Career

From 2009 to 2011, Cleveland served as the Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she supervised the office's legal work relating to the law of war, counterterrorism, and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and assisted with its international human rights and international justice work. She continues to serve as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law. She is a former member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and is a Council Member of the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute.

A native of Alabama, Cleveland began her legal career as a Skadden Fellow representing migrant farmworkers in South Florida. In March 2014, Cleveland was nominated by the U.S. government to serve as an independent expert on the Human Rights Committee, the United Nations treaty body that monitors state implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[3] The committee holds three-month-long meetings each year to review state implementation of the multilateral treaty.[4] The states parties to the multilateral treaty elected her to the committee on June 24, 2014. Her four-year term on the Committee ran for the calendar years 2015-2018.[5]

Cleveland was the U.S. Observer Member and then Member (2010-2019) on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. She is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, and of the American Law Institute.[6][7]

She has been involved in human rights litigation in the United States and before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2007, she taught at the Harvard, University of Michigan, and University of Texas law schools, and at Oxford University.[8] She has also taught at Sciences-Po University, Paris Panthéon-Assas University (Paris II), the European University Institute, the Geneva Graduate Institute and the University of Tokyo, among others.

She serves on the board of directors of Human Rights First.[9]

Biden administration

On August 10, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Cleveland to be the legal adviser of the Department of State.[10] Hearings were held before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Cleveland's nomination on January 12, 2022, but she was not voted out of Committee.[11] In August 2022, the United States National Group to the Permanent Court of Arbitration decided to nominate her to be the U.S. candidate to the International Court of Justice.

Writings

Cleveland has written widely on issues of international law, human rights, and U.S. foreign relations law. She is a co-author of Louis Henkin's Human Rights casebook (2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013) and Paul Stephen and Sarah Cleveland, eds., The Restatement and Beyond: The Past, Present, and Future of U.S. Foreign Relations Law (Oxford University Press, 2020). She served on the board of editors of the Journal of International Economic Law and of the International Review of the Red Cross, and still serves on board of editors of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

Personal life

Cleveland lives in New York and has two children, Richard Tuddenham and Electa Cleveland.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Campaign Materials: Professor Sarah H. Cleveland, U.S. Candidate for Election to the International Court of Justice (2024-2033)". United States Department of State. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
  2. ↑ Columbia Law School - Faculty bio - Sarah Cleveland
  3. ↑ Crosette, Barbara (July 30, 2018). "The UN Eyes a World With Less US". The Nation. Retrieved August 18, 2018.
  4. ↑ U.S. Government Nominates Professor Sarah H. Cleveland to U.N. Human Rights Committee - Columbia Law School News
  5. ↑ Professor Sarah Cleveland Elected to U.N. Human Rights Committee, Columbia Law School News, June 24, 2014. Accessed August 19, 2018.
  6. ↑ The Venice Commission - Individual Members by Country
  7. ↑ Cohen, Roger (February 16, 2018). "Opinion: Awaken, Poland, Before It's Too Late". New York Times. Retrieved August 18, 2018.
  8. ↑ Bhayani, Paras D.; Zhou, Kevin (December 15, 2006). "Profs Assail Anti-Terror Act". Harvard Crimson. Retrieved August 19, 2018.
  9. ↑ "Board Archives". Human Rights First. Retrieved 2023-02-14.
  10. ↑ "President Biden Announces Ten Key Nominations". The White House. 10 August 2021. Retrieved 22 March 2022.
  11. ↑ "PN1034 — Sarah H. Cleveland — Department of State 117th Congress (2021-2022)". US Congress. 8 March 2022. Retrieved 22 March 2022.

Selected publications

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