Naomi Roht-Arriaza, Professor of Law

Professor Roht-Arriaza grew up in New York and Latin America, including stints in Chile, Guatemala and Costa Rica.  All her degrees are from the University of California at Berkeley, including a law degree at Boalt Hall and a Masters at the Graduate (now Goldman) School of Public Policy.  She has also worked as an immigration paralegal, an organizer, a teacher and for a nonprofit focused on corporate accountability.  After graduation she clerked for Judge James Browning of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.  During 1991-92, Professor Roht-Arriaza was the first Riesenfeld Fellow in International Law and Organizations at Boalt Hall.  Professor Roht-Arriaza is the author of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (2005) and Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (1995), and co-editor of Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice. She is a co-author on The International Legal System: Cases and Materials (6th Ed.) with Mary Ellen O'Connell and Dick Scott (Foundation Press, 2010). She continues to write on accountability, both state and corporate, for human rights violations as well as on other human rights, international criminal law and global environmental issues.  In 2011 she was a Democracy Fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and in 2012 she will be a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Botswana.

Professor Roht-Arriaza also does mosaics and stained glass.

Courses Taught: Torts, International Human Rights, International Criminal Law, Reparations for Injustices, and Law and Development

What I hope you get from a legal education at Hastings is... the idea that good lawyering is about much more than reading and analyzing appellate cases.   Especially where human rights issues are concerned, a lawyer has to integrate strategic thinking, media and organizing strategies, work with clients and with multiple organizations, ethical concerns and legislative and regulatory approaches to solving a problem.