Chimène Keitner, Associate Professor of Law

Chimène Keitner's scholarship focuses on the relationships among law, communities, and borders. She holds a J.D. from Yale, a doctorate from Oxford in international relations, and a bachelor's degree from Harvard. Professor Keitner, who was born in Canada, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and was awarded a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans at Yale. During law school, she was a student director of the immigration clinic, an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law, and winner of the best team and best oralist prizes in the Yale moot court competition. After law school, she clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and spent three and a half years in private practice in San Francisco, where she represented plaintiffs in employment discrimination and consumer fraud class actions.  Professor Keitner previously served as a consultant for groups including UNESCO, the Greenland Commission on Self-Government, and the Faroese Constitutional Committee on issues relating to cultural diversity and self-determination.  In 2005, she served as co-counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First in one of the first civil suits to challenge the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, she represented amici Professors of Public International Law and Comparative Law in the U.S. Supreme Court case Samantar v. Yousuf, in which the Court found that the common law, and not the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, governs the immunity of individual foreign officials.

Courses Taught: International Criminal Law, Evidence, and Advanced International Law Research Seminar

Hastings offers you the following unique opportunities... to get a first-rate legal education in the center of San Francisco, surrounded by state and federal trial and appellate courts, and two blocks from the historic building where the U.N. Charter was signed.

... to study with a faculty that values, and is actively engaged in, both the theory and practice of law.