Cynthia Soohoo directs the U.S. Legal Program at the Center. From 2001 to 2007, she was the Director of the Bringing Human Rights Home Project at the Human Rights Institute of Columbia Law School and a Supervising Attorney for the law school’s Human Rights Clinic. She has worked on U.S. human rights issues before UN human rights bodies and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights as well as working in domestic courts on issues including juvenile justice and challenges to the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies post-9/11. Ms. Soohoo practiced law at the firm Covington & Burling for six years and was co-counsel in the landmark Alien Tort Statute case Doe v. Karadzic. She is on the Board of Directors for the U.S. Human Rights Network and is Co-chair of the American Constitutional Society’s Working Group on International Law and the Constitution. She is the co-editor of a three-volume book on human rights and the United States entitled Bringing Human Rights Home, which received the 2008 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book award.

Ms. Soohoo is a cum laude graduate of Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was an editor of the law review and member of the Order of the Coif. She is a former law clerk to the Hon. Gerard L. Goettel, USDJ, SDNY.