Chi Mgbako
Clinical Associate Professor of Law


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 Mgbako is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School. She is a dedicated human rights advocate, having conducted human rights fieldwork, reporting, advocacy and teaching in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Uganda, and the United States. 

The Leitner Clinic engages in projects involving legal and policy analysis, human rights training and capacity building, and public interest litigation on a wide variety of pressing human rights issues in partnership with human rights NGOs and foreign law schools in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Recent projects have focused on prisoners rights, access to justice, reproductive rights, land rights, sex workers rights, HIV/AIDS, and constitutional reform.

Previously, Professor Mgbako was Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights at Fordham Law School, where she designed and led a student and faculty fact-finding project in Malawi, which resulted in a policy report and documentary on discrimination and stigma against women living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi. Before coming to Fordham, she was based in Senegal as Harvard Henigson Human Rights Fellow and Junior Researcher in the West Africa office of the International Crisis Group, an international think tank that works through field based analysis and high level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Her fieldwork, policy analysis, and advocacy focused on justice sector reform in Liberia and Sierra Leone and political reform in Nigeria. She has also conducted human rights fieldwork and reporting in Rwanda and Uganda on post-conflict reconciliation and the persecution of human rights defenders. She is a board member of Timap for Justice, a rural legal aid organization in Sierra Leone.

She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was a co-founder and president of the Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and was awarded the Gary Bellow Public Service Award. 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 and human rights course in Accra, Ghana.

Education

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