Catherine Powell

Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Catherine Powell is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Law Information Society Project. Having served two stints in the White House, Powell is currently a Professor at Fordham Law School and an expert in human rights, constitutional law, equality theory, and technology policy.

During the first half of 2024, Powell took a leave from academia to serve in the Biden-Harris White House Gender Policy Council. Previously, she was Director for Human Rights in the Obama White House National Security Council. During the Obama administration, she also served on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff, where she worked on human rights, women’s rights, refugees, and technology policy.

Powell was a Vice President of the American Society of International Law (2022-24) and Co-Chair of Blacks in ASIL (BASIL) (2020-2023). She also served two terms on the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) Board of Editors, having been elected twice (2015-2023). She currently serves as an adjunct senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, where she is cross-affiliated with the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program and Women and Foreign Policy program.

Professor Powell’s recent scholarship, War on COVID: Warfare and its Discontents, focuses on “racing” national security and advancing feminist approaches to security law, war powers, and emergency powers. As a human rights scholar, her work focuses on race, gender, economic precarity, and emerging technologies. Along these lines, Powell coined the term, Color of Covid, in a CNN op-ed, on which CNN’s Don Lemon, Van Jones, and Sanjay Gupta based the CNN “Color of Covid” cables news mini-series. A longer law review article, Color of COVID and Gender of COVID: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People, explores ways that race and gender tropes are utilized to pathologize particular individuals (and communities) and to roll back rights and, notably, was been cited in the New York Times. This expands on themes she developed in Race, Gender, and Nation in an Age of Shifting Borders: The Unstable Prisms of Masculinity and Motherhood.

In the tech policy field, Powell recently co-authored The Implications of Section 230 for Black Communities (with Spencer Overton). This work builds on her earlier scholarship, Race and Rights in the Digital Age, which argues that even as society moves into a digital age of posthumanism and transhumanism, race endures as a construct. She teaches Human Rights; Constitutional Law; Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a Digital Age; and Feminism, Race & the Law.

Previously, Powell was on the Columbia Law School faculty as founding director of the Human Rights Institute and Clinic. Earlier, she was a litigator at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and served on the Human Rights Watch board.

Powell is a graduate of Yale College, Yale Law School, and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs (master’s degree). She was also a post-graduate fellow at Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Leonard Sand in the SDNY. Follow her on X @ProfCatherine.