Margaret Satterthwaite ’99 wins Alumni Association's Legal Teaching Award

Professor Margaret Satterthwaite ’99, faculty director of the Root-Tilden-Kern Program as well as the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, received the Legal Teaching Award from the NYU Law Alumni Association during its awards luncheon on April 26, held as part of the annual Alumni Reunion. The honor is given to alumni who have become great teachers, as manifested in both their scholarship and their dedication to the education and training of law students. Introducing Satterthwaite’s award at the luncheon was Linda Gadsby ’92, vice president and deputy general counsel of Scholastic.

Margaret Satterthwaite '99

Satterthwaite, who co-teaches the Global Justice Clinic, is currently engaged in scholarship on empirical methods in human rights settings, economic and social rights, and human rights in counterterrorism. Before matriculating at the Law School, she co-founded and then directed Amnesty International USA's program on the human rights of those persecuted for their sexual orientation, and worked for the Haitian National Truth and Justice Commission as a human rights investigator. After graduating, Satterthwaite was a human rights consultant to the United Nations Development Fund for Women. Later, after joining the NYU Law faculty, she served as a consultant to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation.

Satterthwaite has led her clinic in a number of major projects, including several in Haiti—both before and after the devastating 2010 earthquake there—regarding the right to food, the right to water, and gender-based violence and economic and social rights. Other projects have tackled targeted drone killings as well as Central Intelligence Agency practices involving extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture. In 2011 Satterthwaite received the Law School’s Podell Distinguished Teaching Award.

Posted May 2, 2014