By Gwyneth K. Shaw
When Berkeley Law hired Professor Laurel Fletcher for its inaugural in-house clinic, the phrase “human rights” in the United States conjured images of abuses on foreign soil, from brutal regimes in Central and South America to ethnic and religious discrimination in far-flung corners of the globe.
“The original conception of human rights work popularized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch focused on the foreign policy of the U.S. and other powerful Western states,” Fletcher says. “International advocates put a big emphasis on strengthening international norms and institutions as a way to enforce universal rights.”
Over the past 10 to 15 years, changes in the geopolitical realm, the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, and a fresh perspective on domestic policies have shifted the landscape. Some of the clinic’s students — nearly 500 have participated over 25 years — also have different priorities, and the clinic has evolved to keep pace.
With the International Human Rights Law Clinic’s 25th anniversary just past and Fletcher stepping away from sharing the co-director role with Professor Roxanna Altholz ’99 to take on new challenges in the school’s Clinical Program, the timing seemed right for a moniker that resonates with the altered terrain. Moving forward, the Human Rights Clinic will keep its basic mission while expanding its domestic agenda, with Altholz the sole director.
“The clinic has done a lot of work on human rights in the United States, and has started doing more and more work in support of policy advocacy, so the name change is about cementing the direction the clinic has been moving in for quite a while,” Altholz says.
She worked in the clinic as a law student, returning in 2005 as a lecturer before becoming co-director in 2018.
“We’re removing the words ‘international’ and ‘law’ in recognition of our work to address human rights violations in the United States and the range of strategies we use to advance justice,” Altholz says. “‘Human Rights Clinic’ is a more capacious name that reflects the diversity of our partnerships, methods, and projects.”
Students and activists are tapping into the erosion of democracy in the United States, Fletcher says, which has changed their perspective on what “human rights” means.
“This resonates differently now, with social movements utilizing them in the United States and forming global networks anchored in the idea of transnational solidarity.”
Building bridges
The clinic’s roots are in legal work on behalf of immigrants and refugees. From the early 1980s, now-Clinical Professor Emerita Patty Blum supervised students working on asylum cases while also teaching immigration, refugee, and international human rights law. Those early ventures — run out of her office — helped set the table for the 1998 creation of what’s now the school’s robust Clinical Program.
“I had already been directing refugee and asylum clinics, and I benefited from the expansion of the Clinical Program at Berkeley Law to broaden my clinic’s mandate to include international human rights law projects and litigation,” says Blum, who retired from the school in 2003. “That moment was a turning point for the law school and ripe for creativity and experimentation.”
Once the clinic became official, Blum continued the direct representation of asylum seekers under its umbrella. In the succeeding years, the clinic engaged in other endeavors with a domestic angle: An innovative two-year study of former prisoners in the U.S. government’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A report and policy work to support anti-trafficking legislation in California. An examination of the human rights impact of unsolved murders in Oakland, which drew national attention and sharpened Altholz’s interest in similar projects.
While the clinic’s scope will be different, Altholz emphasizes that two of its hallmarks — strong partnerships with organizations outside the law school and a deep commitment to training students while creating a community within their ranks — will remain unchanged. With Fletcher’s departure, the clinic will have two supervising attorneys, Radhika Kapoor and Helen Kerwin, working with Altholz.
“Our longstanding partnerships with organizations and people have always informed how and why we do the work,” Altholz says.
For example, the clinic has worked for years with Alliance San Diego — run by Executive Director Andrea Guerrero ’99, Altholz’s law school classmate — on litigation on behalf of the family of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, who was beaten to death by U.S. Border Patrol agents in 2010.
In 2022, Guerrero and Altholz asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to determine whether the U.S. government violated his rights under the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man — the first time an international human rights body examined an extrajudicial killing by U.S. law enforcement — at a hearing that included emotional testimony from Hernandez Rojas’ widow.
In another case, the clinic partnered with Ana Lorena Delgadillo of Mexico’s Fundación Para la Justicia (Foundation for Justice) to represent the families of migrants and others who have been killed or disappeared — often at the hands of government officials acting in complicity with the nation’s drug cartels. Altholz, Fletcher, and clinic students helped Delgadillo file a criminal complaint against the Mexican attorney general’s office for illegal surveillance after she and her organization were spied on by prosecutors as part of an organized-crime investigation.
They also developed a key argument from the international human rights lens: that the government violated not only the rights of the investigation’s targets, but also those of the victims and their families, since resources were diverted from finding the truth about the massacres.
“They gave us a different perspective on how we should defend ourselves,” Delgadillo says. “Especially with the students, it was very inspiring that they didn’t know me but they were putting in so much time and effort.”
Forging bonds
Clinic students take a seminar that bridges the gap between theory and practice alongside their hands-on legal work. Current and former students say their experience became a highlight of law school and that Fletcher, Altholz, and supervising attorneys offered insight, inspiration, and unflagging energy.
A key component of the clinic’s training is having students practice what it means to be strong advocates and work in solidarity with their clients. Across borders and cultures, Fletcher says, the fight for human rights is grounded in a commitment not only to fighting abuses of power but to deploying advocates’ skills to amplify the voices of directly impacted communities.
“That’s one of the promises of the human rights community — you’re welcome here if you want to walk shoulder to shoulder with those fighting for justice,” she says. “You have a place here, at the clinic and in this space.”
When she transferred to Berkeley Law after her 1L year, Elise Keppler ’01 had a passion for public interest law and had felt isolated in her legal education. When she met Fletcher and Blum, Keppler knew she’d found her niche.
“From there on, the clinic was really my home, the thing that kept me engaged so I could make it to the law school finish line,” she says. “And Patty and Laurel were giants to me — people who had made it in my dream career and could guide me.”
Keppler spent two decades working in international justice at Human Rights Watch before moving to the Global Justice Center last year. Blum and Fletcher continue to be mentors.
“I knew it would be hard to make a human rights career, but I didn’t realize how hard,” she says. “They’ve been instrumental to my professional development at different moments. They had a profound impact on my legal education, and we’re still talking over 20 years later.”
Juan Cabrales ’23 came to Berkeley Law without any human rights experience but was intrigued to see a Latina law professor in a leadership role. He reached out to Altholz before he applied to the clinic, and she was strongly encouraging.
“The opportunity to have mentorship from her directly was one of the things that inspired me to apply,” he says. “I was also really attracted by the ability to work on something I had never done before, and knowing that I would be in good hands with those professors and the training we got and the project-based system, which lets you work with your supervising attorney much more closely.”
After graduation, Cabrales returned to his hometown of San Diego to become a federal public defender. He uses skills and knowledge he gained at the clinic every day.
“One of the lessons I took away from the clinic was something Professor Altholz would always tell us: Lawyering is a team sport,” he says. “I still keep that mantra with me as a federal public defender. And that’s why the clinic is always collaborating with other organizations on really important work.
“It’s a sign of humility as well — they’re always willing to listen and be informed by those communities, and keep the priorities of those that we’re representing or advocating for in our minds.”
A new landscape
Keppler’s career move reflects the same sea change that’s driving the clinic’s revamped mission.
The Global Justice Center uses international law to advance gender equality through two main areas of emphasis: access to abortion as an international right and justice for mass atrocities involving sexual- and gender-based crimes. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision unleashed a crisis on abortion, the organization knew it needed to turn its attention domestically.
Altholz’s plan to expand the clinic’s domestic footprint has similar potential, she adds.
“For me, to use my international human rights law expertises to fight for reproductive autonomy in the U.S. feels important and valuable,” Keppler says. “International law is an underutilized element that can bolster the constellation of pressure points needed to ensure people have abortion access in the U.S. over time.”
Fletcher, who is starting the new Global Rights Innovation Lab Clinic in the spring semester, says there doesn’t need to be tension between human rights work that’s focused abroad or at home.
“I find it helpful to think about the human rights movement as an ecosystem,” she says. “Sometimes there’s a tendency to pick which version of ‘human rights’ we’re going to narrate. But it’s not binary — it’s more like a mosaic.”
In recent years, a larger number of law students have come into the clinic with that mindset already in place, Fletcher and Altholz say. For some, an increased awareness of problems with the criminal justice system, particularly the carceral state, resonated at the same frequency as situations decried abroad.
For others, it’s because their own life experience made domestic culpability for human rights violations plain.
Maria Watson ’25 grew up undocumented in Los Angeles and became acutely aware of the capriciousness and unfairness of immigration laws from a young age. In high school and college, she was increasingly interested in international law but couldn’t see a path forward due to her citizenship status.
Watson’s experience made it easy for her to see the parallels between human rights abuses outside the U.S. and major concerns at home.
“When I was younger, I’d think of international human rights work and think about nonprofits and working abroad — my mental image was people from prestigious universities going to another country to save other people,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Why aren’t we discussing domestic problems?’ When I met Professor Altholz, we talked about the work the clinic was doing around immigrant workers, and she was talking about ‘bringing human rights home.’
“That was particularly appealing, because I could see that if we look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are many violations happening here.”
Unique composition
The changing population of students who work in the clinic has made a huge difference, Altholz says. Students of color, particularly women of color, are heavily represented, and having a critical mass of Spanish speakers means the clinic can staff entire projects that operate only in that language. That’s a big deal in a California school focused on serving the public.
Altholz and Fletcher are also grateful for the extensive institutional support the clinic enjoys, not just in staffing.
“There have been moments where our work has been challenged by political and economic elites, and the law school — Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in particular — defended that work,” Altholz says. “I’ve never felt like the project needs to be filtered through a political lens; we’ve been able to defend human rights where they need defense. I don’t take it for granted.”
The clinic’s new name and reshaped mission reflect what the students and partner organizations are passionate about, she adds: not just exposing human rights violations that occur in the U.S., but leveraging human rights principles and laws to address the deterioration of our democratic institutions.
“At this moment, human rights clinics have exceptional insight into what’s happening in this country,” Altholz says. “I think our docket will remain diverse geographically, but the way we relate to human rights violations and the rule of law here at home must evolve to address the situation in the United States.”
At home or abroad, human rights advocacy is “heavy work,” Cabrales says, and the clinic is a mind-expanding experience and a place to find solace and stay grounded. He’s confident the next chapters will be as dynamic and effective as the first 25 years.
“Their leadership has definitely been tenacious and inspiring in a lot of ways. But what they’ve really been able to do is build a line of communication — a thread of advocacy around the world, to raise the alarm on a lot of things that aren’t being discussed for many different reasons,” he says. “Professor Altholz and Professor Fletcher are both incredibly mindful and compassionate about raising the perspective of people who aren’t getting attention.
“And a quarter century of advocating for that, while building partnerships with communities and organizations, has created a force for good in the world.”