Azadeh Shahshahani, G. Rollie White Public Interest Scholar in Residence

About Azadeh Shahshahani 

Azadeh Shahshahani, the Legal and Advocacy Director at Project South, is a movement lawyer dedicated to confronting state repression and dismantling systems of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation. For more than two decades, she has organized to protect migrants and Black and Muslim communities from systemic Islamophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Black racism. She also supports social justice movements in the Global South. 

Azadeh is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild and currently serves on the Advisory Council of the American Association of Jurists. She is the author or editor of numerous human rights reports, law review articles, and book chapters addressing movement lawyering, immigrants’ rights, the surveillance of Muslim-Americans, and the use of international human rights frameworks as tools for liberation. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, Time, Boston Review, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. 

Azadeh received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she served as an articles editor for the Michigan Journal of International Law. She also holds a Master’s degree in Modern Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan. 

About the G. Rollie Public Interest Scholar in Residence program: 

Shahshahani’s visit to Texas Law as a G. Rollie White Public Interest Scholar in Residence is supported by a generous gift from the G. Rollie White Trust. The program brings outstanding legal scholars, practitioners and advocates from the field of public service to Texas Law to foster discussion of issues related to public interest law, to raise the profile of lawyers working in this area, and to encourage students to view public service as an honored and expected part of every legal career. Shahshahani is Texas Law’s fourteenth G. Rollie White Public Interest Scholar in Residence. 

Contact Information:

Liza Soria (Center Coordinator/Event Organizer)
liza.soria@law.utexas.edu