Susan Farbstein

Susan Farbstein is the Director of the International Human Rights Clinic and a Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School, where she has taught since 2008. She supervises projects that seek accountability for abuses committed by individuals and corporations, promote socio-economic rights including water and education, and advance gender equity and women’s leadership.  

She is an expert on South Africa, where she has engaged on a variety of human rights and transitional justice issues for more than twenty years. Her writing has been published in the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard International Law Journal, as well as popular media outlets including The New York Times. In 2015, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly named her one of the Commonwealth’s “Top Women of Law.” In 2018, the Harvard Women’s Law Association honored her as a “Woman Inspiring Change.” 

She has a robust litigation practice, including Mamani v. Sanchez de Lozada, a landmark case holding the former Bolivian president and minister of defense liable for extrajudicial killings; Wiwa v. Shell, charging Shell with complicity in the extrajudicial killings of non-violent Nigerian activists, for which she was honored as a finalist for the 2010 Public Justice Trial Lawyer of the Year Award; and In re South African Apartheid Litigation, a suit against major multinationals for aiding and abetting abuses committed by the apartheid state. She has authored numerous amicus curiae briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and provides strategic and legal advice on human rights cases in other jurisdictions. 

Before joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Farbstein worked at the Cape Town office of the International Center for Transitional Justice and clerked for the Honorable Morris E. Lasker of the Southern District of New York. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.