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Amna Akbar is Attorney-in-Residence/ Adjunct Professor of Law in the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, a cross-clinical collaboration between the Immigrant & Refugee Rights Clinic and the Defenders Clinic at CUNY School of Law. CLEAR aims to address the unmet legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are particularly affected by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices.
She also serves as Scholar in Residence at the Center for Human Rights & Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. Prior to joining CUNY, she supervised students in the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU, first as a Clinic Fellow and then as Senior Research Scholar and Advocacy Fellow, in a variety of transnational and community-based lawyering projects.
With her students, she has taken on litigation, research, policy, and advocacy work on domestic and international human rights impacts of the US-led "war on terror." She has represented men held by the U.S. government in its secret prisons, as well as Amnesty International USA in Freedom of Information Act litigation. She has supported community-based efforts to organize against domestic counter-terrorism policies and led efforts to document impacts of the domestic war on terror.
She oversaw the Asian Battered Women's Project at Queens Legal Services Corporation (QLS), where she combined direct legal services work with community and impact lawyering for immigrant battered women. While at QLS, she coauthored a chapter of a shadow report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination analyzing the failures of U.S. courts, legislatures, and police in protecting the human rights of battered women of color and immigrant women. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 2004, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Law Review and clerked for Gerard E. Lynch, United States District Court, Southern District of New York. She has also worked for the Federal Defenders, Southern District of New York; the former Democratic Whip David Bonior (D-MI); the Pacifica Network's WBAI, 99.5 FM, and the Domestic Violence Response Project of the SafeHouse Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Her research interests lie at the intersections of national security and criminal law, as well in theorizing what makes particular human rights impacts visible and others not. She is also interested in the role of the law as a force that maintains inequality, and as a tool to challenge that same inequality, and the ethical challenges and opportunities that tension creates for lawyers in serving clients and communities.
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