Expertise: International human rights (including women’s rights and indigenous rights), law and culture, feminism and law, employment discrimination

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Senior Fellow

Strauss Center Senior Fellow Karen Engle is Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law and Director of the  Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, which she helped found in 2004.  She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies.  She teaches courses in public international law, international human rights and employment discrimination.

Professor Engle received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree from Baylor University. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Jerre S. Williams on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then served as a a post-doctoral Ford Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School.  She was Professor of Law at the University of Utah prior to joining the University of Texas.

Professor Engle writes and lectures extensively on international law and human rights.  Her recent works include "Indigenous Roads to Development" (forthcoming, Handbook of International Law, Routledge), "Judging  Sex in War" (forthcoming, Michigan Law Review), "Calling in the Troops:  The Uneasy Relationship Among Human Rights, Women's Rights and Humanitarian Intervention," Harvard Human Rights Law Journal (2007),  “Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing War-Time Rape in Bosnia,”  American Journal of International Law (2005), “Liberal Internationalism, Feminism and the Suppression of Critique: Contemporary Approaches to Global Order in the United States,” Harvard International Law Journal (2005) and “International Human Rights and Feminisms: When Discourses Keep Meeting” in International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (2005).  Professor Engle spent spring and summer of 2007 in Bogotà, Colombia, where she investigagted adn lectured on indigenous rights and Afro-Colombian rights.  She has been named a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

The Strauss Center co-sponsored two interdisciplinary student delegations led by Professor Engle over the past two years--one to Colombia and one to Brazil--to conduct research on Afro-descendant land rights in Latin America.  Students from the School of Law, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Latin American Studies met with government officials, NGOs and Afro-descendant communities in both countries.  They submitted a report on Colombia to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and drafted a memorandum for members of Congress on the proposed Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.  They are working on a report on Brazil.

The delegation’s report and memorandum on Colombia and a recent press release on the trip to Brazil

Rapaport Center for Human Rights and Justice

Selected Research:

• "'Calling in the Troops': The Uneasy Relationship Among Women's Rights, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Intervention," Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2007