Dina Francesca Haynes is the Executive Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, a Lecturer in Law, and a Researcher in Law at Yale Law School. During her career, she has been a Professor of Law, Practitioner in Residence at law schools including American University’s Washington College of Law and Georgetown Law. She has taught constitutional law, public international law, human rights courses, and courses related to refugee and asylum law, migration, and human trafficking. She has also taught in international human rights clinics.
Haynes has written and practiced law extensively in the areas of migration, refugees, gender, regressive governance, and transitional justice. She has written and co-authored three books, two published by Oxford University Press, including the OUP Handbook on Gender and Conflict and On the Frontlines, which were selected for Leading Works in International Law. She has published more than 30 law review articles, in journals such as the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the International Criminal Law Review, as well as leading interdisciplinary journals, including the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She has also contributed more than 20 chapters in books including Women’s Rights (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Feminist Perspectives on Transitional Justice, edited by Martha Fineman.
Prior to teaching law, Haynes worked as an international human rights lawyer in Rwanda with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in Afghanistan and Croatia with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Throughout her career, Haynes has continued to engage in significant pro bono work. She has represented hundreds of clients seeking asylum, international protection, and family reunification, as well as T and U visas and Special Immigration Juvenile Status. She has engaged in extensive impact litigation, joining challenges to each of the Executive Orders aimed at restricting immigration and immigrant rights, and filing or joining amicus briefs in most of the US appellate courts, before the Supreme Court, at the ECHR, the IACHR and before the African Commission. Haynes has also engaged in extensive policy advocacy and advised the US and other governments on laws and policies relating to migration, gender and human trafficking.
Haynes received her B.A. in English Literature and International Studies from the University of Denver. Before law school, Haynes was in the Peace Corps (Chad). She received her J.D. from the University of Cincinnati where she was an Urban Morgan Human Rights Fellow, a judicial clerk to Senior Judge Nathaniel Jones of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Honorable Unity Dow in Botswana, and a law clerk with the American Civil Liberties Union. After receiving her J.D., Haynes clerked on the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa and was an Honor Graduate Attorney with the US Department of Justice. She received her L.L.M. from Georgetown Law, where she was a Fellow in the Center for Applied Legal Studies.
