Faculty Co-Director, Human Rights Institute;
Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Law;
Director, Smith Family Human Rights Clinic

Sarah Knuckey joined Columbia Law School in July 2014 as faculty co-director of the Human Rights Institute, director of the Human Rights Clinic, and the Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Law. Knuckey is an international human rights lawyer, professor, and special adviser to the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. She has carried out factfinding investigations and reported on human rights and armed conflict violations around the world, including in Afghanistan, Brazil, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, and the United States.

Knuckey’s work has addressed issues such as unlawful killings, armed conflict, sexual violence, corporate accountability, extractive industries, and protest rights. Her academic research interests include human rights methodologies, critical perspectives on human rights, new weapons technologies, transparency norms, and post-traumatic stress disorder and resilience.   

Knuckey is a founding editor of Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy. She has been awarded the Fulbright Postgraduate Award, the Murphy Postgraduate Scholarship, the Harvard Human Rights Program Fellowship, the Parsons Memorial Prize for Law, and the KCF Keall Prize in Law.

Before joining Columbia Law School, Knuckey was an adjunct professor of clinical law and director of the Initiative on Human Rights Fact-Finding and the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. She also previously clerked for Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby and served as the Everett Public Service Fellow at Human Rights Watch. She is also an Extraordinary Lecturer at the Center for Human Rights, University of Pretoria in South Africa.