Sarah H. Cleveland is the Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights, and Faculty Co-Director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia University Law School in New York, where she teaches and writes in the areas of international law, human rights, national security and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations.

Cleveland is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law and the UK/Canadian High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, a Council Member of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and a Commissioner with the International Commission of Jurists. She was formerly Vice Chair and Member of the UN Human Rights Committee (2015-2018) and Member of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe (2010-2019), and served as Co-Coordinating Reporter of the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States (2012-18). From 2009 to 2011, Cleveland served as the Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she helped supervise the office's legal work relating to human rights, counterterrorism, the law of armed conflict, and international justice. where she helped supervise the office's legal work relating to human rights, counterterrorism, the law of armed conflict, and international justice. A former Rhodes Scholar and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, she is a graduate of Brown University (A.B.), Oxford University (M.St.) and Yale Law School (J.D.).  

She has written widely on issues of international law, national security, and human rights, including Human Rights (Foundation Press, 2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013); Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Age of Connectivity, in Système de Protection des Droits de L’Homme des Nations Unies : Présent et Avenir (University of Paris Panthéon-Assas, 2017); Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties (Yale L. J. 2015); Embedded International Law and the Constitution Abroad (Colum. L. Rev. 2010); and Our International Constitution (Yale J. Int'l L. 2006).  including Human Rights (Foundation Press, 2nd ed. 2009 and update 2013); Human Rights Treaty Bodies in the Age of Connectivity, in Système de Protection des Droits de L’Homme des Nations Unies : Présent et Avenir (University of Paris Panthéon-Assas, 2017); Defining and Punishing Offenses Under Treaties (Yale L. J. 2015); Embedded International Law and the Constitution Abroad (Colum. L. Rev. 2010); and Our International Constitution (Yale J. Int'l L. 2006).  She has taught at the Harvard, Michigan, and University of Texas law schools; Oxford University, Sciences-Po University, Paris, the University Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and the European University Institute, Florence.