Jeena Shah

Jeena Shah is a Professor of Law, specializing in the Fourteenth Amendment, International Law, and Critical Race Theory. Professor Shah’s scholarship focuses on the law’s relationship with racial capitalism, neo-imperialism, and contemporary forms of colonialism and settler apartheid. Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, Professor Shah directed the International Human Rights Clinic at Rutgers Law School and practiced as a litigator and movement lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights and community-based law offices in Haiti and India. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards including the Excellence in Teaching and Pedagogy Award from the City University of New York, the Outstanding Professor of the Year Award at CUNY Law, and the National Lawyers Guild’s Arthur Kinoy Award at Rutgers Law.

Professor Shah’s academic writing has appeared in law journals such as the Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Clinical Law Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, and others. She was selected to present her scholarship on a decolonial approach to assessing the legality of economic sanctions at the the Rahmania Annual Seminar in Istanbul, Turkey in 2025 and at the TWAILR Academy in Bogotá, Colombia in 2023. She has also presented her work and guest lectured at numerous academic institutions, including Yale, Stanford, UCLA, and NYU.

Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, Professor Shah directed the International Human Rights Clinic and co-taught in the Constitutional Rights Clinic at Rutgers Law School, where she was a visiting professor. In that role, she supervised students in litigation and advocacy in support of grassroots groups fighting for racial and economic justice, the rights of immigrant and LGBTQ communities, and veterans care.

Before entering academia, Professor Shah spent her career as a litigator in U.S. federal courts and a transnational movement lawyer. As an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), she played a central role in litigating Al Shimari v. CACI, a case brought on behalf of survivors of torture in Abu Ghraib, which ultimately led to a landmark verdict against a U.S. government contractor, and Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively, a first-of-its kind case brought by a Ugandan LGBTI advocacy organization against a prominent U.S. anti-gay extremist, in which a federal judge ruled that persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a crime against humanity. While at CCR, Professor Shah also provided legal and advocacy support to racial justice movements in the wake of the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, and trained hundreds of attorneys on movement lawyering.

Prior to her work with CCR, Professor Shah practiced at community-based law offices in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Gujarat, India. In Haiti, she supported local lawyers and organizers fighting unlawful evictions of communities displaced by the 2010 earthquake, supported the Ministry of Justice in its prosecution of former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier for crimes against humanity, and served as an observer of the country’s national elections. In India, she supported local lawyers and organizers supporting Dalit communities in their struggles against caste-based discrimination, and helped organize a people’s tribunal on the State of Gujarat’s lack of enforcement of anti-caste discrimination laws. At the start of her legal career, Professor Shah practiced as a litigator at an international law firm specializing in complex litigation and internal investigations. Her practice there covered a range of matters including civil rights, labor, asylum, family, and commercial law cases, and supported DOJ-appointed monitorships of U.S. corporations found to have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Professor Shah helped found and direct the Movement Lawyering Boot Camp, a joint initiative between Law for Black Lives and Movement Law Lab, and guest lectures for Movement Law Lab and plays an advisory role for the Lab’s Global Network of Movement Lawyers.

Professor Shah has appeared on various media outlets, including Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera, to discuss human rights issues.

Professor Shah graduated from NYU School of Law in 2007 and received her B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science and French from Drew University in 2004.