Cynthia Soohoo is Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic (formerly named International Women’s Human Rights Clinic) at the City of New York School of Law. She is in expert on reproductive justice, women’s human rights, and human rights advocacy in the United States. She supervises the clinic’s work on reproductive rights and health, trafficking, and youth in the adult criminal justice system.

Prior to coming to CUNY, Professor Soohoo was the Director of the U.S. Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights. In addition to managing U.S. litigation and state advocacy work, she spearheaded and supervised the development of the Center’s U.S. human rights advocacy and fact-finding work and the growth of its Law School Initiative.

From 2001-2007, Prof. Soohoo was the Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School, and a supervising attorney for the law school’s Human Rights Clinic. She has worked on U.S. human rights issues before U.N. human rights bodies, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, and in domestic courts. Prof. Soohoo practiced law at the firm Covington & Burling for six years and was co-counsel in the landmark Alien Tort Statute case, Doe v. Karadzic.

Professor Soohoo is an author and frequent commentator on women’s human rights, the rights of youth in detention, and human rights advocacy in the United States. She has authored submissions to the U.S. Supreme Court, appellate courts and international forums on access to abortion, forced sterilization and criminalization of reproductive choices. She co-edited BRINGING HUMAN RIGHTS HOME, a three-volume book on human rights in the United States, which received the 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She is a co-editor (with Professor Richard Storrow) of the Reproductive Rights Professor Blog and frequent contributor to the Bringing Human Rights Home Law Professor Blog.

Professor Soohoo is on the board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative and the Advisory Board for the Lawyering Project. She is the former board chair of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a national network dedicated to building and strengthening a people centered human rights movement in the United States. She served as co-chair of the American Constitutional Society’s Working Group on International Law and the Constitution and as a member of the national board of If/When/How (formerly Law Students for Reproductive Justice).

Prof. Soohoo is a cum laude graduate of Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was an editor of the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. She is a former law clerk to the Hon. Gerard L. Goettel, U.S.D.J., S.D.N.Y.

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Contact

Email
cynthia.soohoo@law.cuny.edu
Phone
718-340-4329
Office
5-305

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