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Chi Mgbako
Clinical Associate Professor of Law
Director, Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic


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Fordham University School of Law
Leitner Center
33 West 60th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10023

 		Email: mgbako@law.fordham.edu
Telephone: 212.636.7716
Fax: 212.636.6775
Office: Room 223

Chi Adanna Mgbako is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic in the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. Her writing and human rights work focuses primarily on access to justice and women's rights in Africa. She has conducted human rights fieldwork and advocacy in Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Uganda, among other countries. 

The Leitner Human Rights Clinic conducts mobile legal aid clinics and engages in legal and policy analysis, human rights trainings, submissions before human rights bodies and public interest litigation in partnership with international human rights NGOs. Recent projects have focused on prisoners rights, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, legal empowerment, sex workers rights, HIV/AIDS, and U.S. foreign policy.

Previously, she was Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights at the Leitner Center where she designed and led a student and faculty fact-finding project and documentary film on the feminization of HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Before coming to Fordham, she was based in Senegal as Harvard Henigson Human Rights Fellow in the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group, where her work focused on justice sector reform in Liberia and Sierra Leone and political reform in Nigeria.

She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was awarded the Gary Bellow Public Service Award, the Dean's Award for Community Leadership, and the Kaufman Public Service Fellowship. She received her B.A. in History, magna cum laude, from Columbia University, where she was a John F. Kluge Scholar. Prior to law school, she taught an African women’s history course in Accra, Ghana.

Professor Mgbako's recent and forthcoming publications include:

BOOK CHAPTERS:
  • Engaging Legal Dualism: Paralegal Organizations and Customary Law in Sierra Leone and Liberia in THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN CUSTOMARY LAW, Cambridge University Press, Jeanmarie Fenrich, Paolo Galizzi, and Tracy Higgins, eds. (with Kristina Scurry Baehr) (forthcoming 2011)

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REPORTS:

COMMENTARY:

Education

  • Harvard Law School, J.D., 2005
  • Columbia University, B.A., magna cum laude, 2001