Susan Farbstein

Lectrurer on Law

Appointments

• Clinical Instructor, Human Rights Program

Practice Information

Susan Farbstein's work focuses on litigation under the Alien Tort Statute and on issues related to transitional justice, particularly in Southern Africa. Through the Clinic, she is co-counsel on In re South African Apartheid Litigation, a suit against multinational corporations for aiding and abetting human rights violations in apartheid South Africa, and Mamani v. Sanchez-Berzain, which brings claims against the former president and defense minister of Bolivia related to a 2003 massacre of civilians. She also assisted in litigating Wiwa v. Shell, which charged Shell with complicity in the torture and killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s, and which Shell settled for $15.5 million in June 2009. Her most recent publication is Prosecuting Apartheid-Era Crimes? A South African Dialogue on Justice (with Tyler Giannini). Before joining the Human Rights Program, Farbstein worked at the Cape Town office of the International Center for Transitional Justice, where her position was funded by a Harvard Kaufman Fellowship and Princeton-in-Africa. Prior to her time at ICTJ, she clerked for two years for the Honorable Morris E. Lasker of the Southern District of New York. She previously interned with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICTJ's New York office, and has provided research assistance to the Special Court for Sierra Leone and Human Rights First. While in law school, she served as Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and as a teaching assistant to Professor Laurence Tribe. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from Princeton University.

Additional Information

Ms. Farbstein will co-teach, with Tyler Giannini, the seminar Human Rights Advocacy in Contemporary South Africa in the Spring Term 2010.