Chimène Keitner

Chimène Keitner is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Hasting's College of the Law. Her 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 the first civil suit to challenge the government's 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. Professor Keitner also served as Co-Chair for the American Society of International Law's 105th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.