Laith Aqel

Laith Aqel is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and the Robert M. Cover-Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Aqel’s current work focuses on challenging government abuses under national security pretexts, the weaponization of anti-terrorism laws, and the suppression of community organizers and activists in the United States and abroad. At Yale, Aqel is largely interested in questions surrounding human rights, liberation, and material decolonization.

Most recently, Aqel was a Robert L. Bernstein Fellow, working with indigenous communities on a range of issues from forced displacement and dispossession to the role of transnational corporations in war crimes and human rights violations. Domestically, Aqel has participated in litigation challenging racist immigration policies, incommunicado military detention, and U.S. involvement in crimes against humanity and genocide.

While a student at Yale Law School, Aqel was an executive editor for the Yale Journal of International Law, the legal director and policy chair for the International Refugee Assistance Project’s YLS chapter, a student director for the Center for Global Legal Challenges, chair of the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, and a student member of both the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Rule of Law Clinic. Aqel was also a Yale Fox International Fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.