Karen Engle
- Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair
- Professor, Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice
Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and founder and co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She teaches courses in public international law, international human rights law, and legal theory. Professor Engle writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in international human rights, international criminal law, and Latin American law. Professor Engle has received prestigious fellowships and has taught at various universities worldwide.
KAREN ENGLE is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Women's and Gender Studies. She teaches courses and specialized seminars in public international law, international human rights law, and legal theory.
Professor Engle writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and Latin American law. She is author of numerous scholarly articles and of Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2025), The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (Stanford University Press, 2020), as well as The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights. She is co-editor of Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution (Columbia University Press, 2025), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and After Identity: A Reader in Law and Culture (Routledge, 1995).
Professor Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and an assignment as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bogotá in 2010. In 2016-17, she was the Deborah Lunder and Alan Ezekowitz Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has taught at a number of universities around the world and, most recently, was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2018.
Professor Engle received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. with honors from Baylor University. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Jerre S. Williams on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then served as a post-doctoral Ford Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School. She was Professor of Law at the University of Utah prior to joining the University of Texas in 2002.
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year-2025
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Book
Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence
Karen Engle. Toward an Abolitionist Human Rights Court: Rethinking Responses to Gendered and Racialized Violence ( Cambridge University Press, May 2025). View online. -
Book
Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution
Karen Engle, Neville Hoad. Hierarchies at Work: Race, World-Systems, and Legal Distribution (edited by Karen Engle and Neville Hoad. Columbia University Press, June 2025). View online. -
Book Chapter
Beyond Essential: Growh, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a "Progressive" Texas Boomtown
Karen Engle, Samuel Tabory. “Beyond Essential: Growh, a Pandemic, and the Future of Expendable Workers in a "Progressive" Texas Boomtown” In Hierarchies at Work, Page 281 ( Columbia University Press, June 2025). View online.
year-2024
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Book Chapter
Abolitionist human rights: Queering LGBT human rights advocacy and law
Karen Engle. “Abolitionist human rights: Queering LGBT human rights advocacy and law” In Queer Encounters with International Law: Lives, Communities, Subjectivities, Page 60-83 (edited by Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Claerwen O'Hara, Routledge, October 6, 2024). View online. -
Article
On international law and Gaza: critical reflections
Karen Engle. " On international law and Gaza: critical reflections." In 0 London Review of International Law, Page 5 (July 29, 2024). (with Fionnuala Ní Aoláin). View online.
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Article
‘Private’ Diplomacy and Nuclear Disarmament: Revisiting the Cold War Activism of Women for a Meaningful Summit
Karen Engle. "‘Private’ Diplomacy and Nuclear Disarmament: Revisiting the Cold War Activism of Women for a Meaningful Summit." In 74 University of Toronto Law Journal, Page 43 (2024). View online.
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Article
Introduction to the Symposium on International Laws Public and Private
Karen Engle, Fleur Johns, Annelise Riles. "Introduction to the Symposium on International Laws Public and Private." In 118 AJIL Unbound, Page 1 (January 15, 2024). View online.
year-2022
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Article
Looking Back to Think Forward: What we Might Learn from Cold War Feminist Movements
Karen Engle. "Looking Back to Think Forward: What we Might Learn from Cold War Feminist Movements." In 116 AJIL Unbound, Page 264 (September 12, 2022). View online.
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Book Chapter
Feminist Approaches to International Law
Karen Engle, Vasuki Nesiah, Dianne L. Otto. "Feminist Approaches to International Law" In International Legal Theory: Foundations and Frontiers, Page 174 (edited by Jeffrey L. Dunoff, Mark A. Pollack, Cambridge University Press, July 2022). View online.
year-2021
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Article
Quilombo Land Rights, Brazilian Constitutionalism, and Racial Capitalism
Karen Engle, Lucas Lixinski. "Quilombo Land Rights, Brazilian Constitutionalism, and Racial Capitalism." In 54 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Page 831 (Fall 2021). View online.
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Book
Power, Participation, and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights Under Supply Chain Capitalism
Karen Engle. Power, Participation, and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights Under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited by Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, Karen Engle, and Kate Taylor. University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2021). View online.
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Book Chapter
Private Regulatory Initiatives, Human Rights, and Supply Chain Capitalism
Karen Engle, Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, and Kate Taylor. "Private Regulatory Initiatives, Human Rights, and Supply Chain Capitalism" In Power, Participation, and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights Under Supply Chain Capitalism, Page 3 (University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2021). View online.
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Book Chapter
Private Regulatory Initiatives and Beyond: Lessons and Reflections
Karen Engle, Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, and Kate Taylor. "Private Regulatory Initiatives and Beyond: Lessons and Reflections" In Power, Participation, and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights Under Supply Chain Capitalism, Page 258 (edited by Daniel Brinks, Julia Dehm, Karen Engle, and Kate Taylor, University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2021). View online.
year-2020
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Book
The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law
Karen Engle, The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (Stanford University Press, 2020). View Online
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Article
Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality
Daniel M. Brinks, Karen Engle, Julia Dehm. "Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality." In 10 Humanity, Page 363 (Winter 2019). View online.
year-2019
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Book Chapter
Human Rights Consciousness and Critique
Karen Engle. "Human Rights Consciousness and Critique" In A Time for Critique, Page 91 (edited by Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt, eds., Columbia University Press, 2019). View online.
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Article
Mapping the Shift: Human Rights and Criminal Law
Karen Engle. "Mapping the Shift: Human Rights and Criminal Law." In 112 Proceedings of the American Society of International Law Annual Meeting, Page 84 (2019). View online.
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Book Chapter
Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism
Karen Engle. "Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism" In Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, Page 3 (edited by Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché & Hila Shamir, University of Minnesota Press, 2019). View online.
year-2018
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Book
El desarrollo indígena, una promesa esquiva. Derechos, cultura, estrategia
Karen Engle. El desarrollo indígena, una promesa esquiva. Derechos, cultura, estrategia (Siglo del Hombre and Universidad de Los Andes, 2018). View online.
year-2017
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Book Chapter
A Genealogy of the Centrality of Sexual Violence to Gender and Conflict
Karen Engle. "A Genealogy of the Centrality of Sexual Violence to Gender and Conflict" In Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, Page 132 (edited by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Nahla Valji, Oxford University Press, 2018). View online.
spring 2026
- International Human Rights Law