Hope Lewis

Professor Hope Lewis specializes in international law, including human rights. She co-edited Human Rights and the Global Marketplace: Economic, Social, and Cultural Dimensions (with Jeanne Woods, 2005), the first US human rights textbook to focus primarily on globalization and economic, social and cultural rights. It received the “Notable Contribution to Human Rights Scholarship” award from the US Human Rights Network in 2008. A co-founder of the law school’s Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy, Lewis co-edits the SSRN online publication, Human Rights and the Global Economy. Her articles exploring race, gender, transnational migration and culture appear in leading law reviews and journals on international law, race and the law, and gender and the law. She is a regular contributor to IntLawGrrls.com, the international law professors’ blog.

Professor Lewis was a fall 2008 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research and received the 2001 Haywood Burns-Shanara Gilbert Award in recognition of her teaching, scholarship and human rights advocacy. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University. She is also an elected member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on International Law and an appointed member of the program committee for the 104th annual meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), to be held in Washington, DC, in March 2010.

Prior to joining the law faculty in 1991, Professor Lewis served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Chief Counsel of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, where her responsibilities included the international regulation of investment funds and financial advisers. As a human rights lawyer for TransAfrica Forum, the NGO for US foreign policy toward Africa and the Caribbean in the late 1980s, she researched anti-apartheid legislation, African women’s economic and reproductive rights, and the history of African-American internationalism. She currently teaches International Law, Human Rights and the Global Economy, and related courses.

Selected Publications

“Human Rights and the Global Economy: The Promises and Failures of Globalization,” Progressive Lawyering, Globalization and Markets: Rethinking Ideology and Strategy. Dalton, ed. William S. Hein & Co., 2007.
“Human Rights and Natural Disaster: The Indian Ocean Tsunami,” Human Rights, Magazine of the American Bar Association Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities. Fall 2006.
Human Rights and The Global Marketplace: Economic, Social and Cultural Dimensions, ed., with Woods. Transnational Publishers, 2005.
“Embracing Complexity: Human Rights in Critical Race Feminist Perspective,” 12 Columbia Journal of Gender & Law 510, 2003.
“Universal Mother: The Human Rights of Black Women in the Americas, Transnational Migration, and the Complexity of Identity,” 5 Iowa Journal of Gender Race & Justice 197, 2001.

“Duties of Fund Directors Under State Law,” Fund Governance: Duties of Mutual Fund Directors. Robertson, ed. American Lawyer Publishing, 2001.
“Reflections on ‘BlackCrit Theory’: Human Rights,” 45 Villanova Law Review, 2000.
“‘Culturing’ Survival: Afro-Caribbean Migrant Culture and the Human Rights of Women Under Globalization,” Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law. Mar. 24-27, 1999, Washington, DC.
“Global Intersections: Critical Race Feminist Human Rights and Inter/national Black Women,” 50 Maine Law Review 309-326, 1998.
“Lionheart Gals Facing the Dragon: The Human Rights of Inter/national Black Women in the United States,” 76 Oregon Law Review 567-632, 1997.
“Between Irua and ‘Female Genital Mutilation’: Feminist Human Rights and the Cultural Divide,” 8 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1, 1995