Leila Sadat
Schell Center Visiting Human Rights Fellow
The James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law and longtime Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law, Leila Nadya Sadat has served as the Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the International Court Prosecutor since 2012 and was a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2001-2003. In AY 2021 she was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Sadat is an authority in the fields of public international law, international criminal law, human rights, and foreign affairs, and has published more than 165 books and articles in leading journals, academic presses, and media outlets throughout the world, including casebooks on International Criminal Law and Public International Law and a monograph, The International Criminal Court and the Transformation of International Law: Justice for the New Millenium. Sadat directs the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, a ground-breaking project launched in 2008 that wrote the world’s first global treaty on crimes against humanity and continues to spearhead global efforts to negotiate this important new treaty. Closer to home, she has been working on a project on gun violence and human rights, recently publishing Torture in our Schools? with the Harvard Law Review, that addresses the crisis of mass shootings in U.S. Schools. She was the first woman to receive the Alexis de Tocqueville Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Paris, France (2011) and received an Honorary Doctorate from Northwestern University as well as the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award from Washington University in 2017. Sadat is the President of the International Law Association (American Branch), Chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on International Law, and a member of the American Law Institute and the US Council on Foreign Relations. Sadat holds law degrees from Columbia Law School, Tulane Law School, and the University of Paris I – Sorbonne.
