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Research Bio

Saira Mohamed is the Agnes Roddy Robb Chair of Jurisprudence, Ethics, and Social Responsibility and Professor of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of international law, criminal law, and human rights, and her research primarily focuses on questions of responsibility for wrongdoing in situations of armed conflict and mass atrocity. Her current project examines how international and domestic law regulate governments’ treatment of their military personnel. Her book What a State Owes Its Soldiers is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Mohamed’s articles have appeared in top journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and California Law Review. She has received numerous prizes for her scholarship, including the award for the best paper by a junior scholar from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Criminal Justice and the National Institute of Military Justice’s Kevin J. Barry Award for the best article in military law. Mohamed was awarded the Berlin Prize and spent the fall 2023 semester as the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

In 2025, Mohamed was awarded Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. Mohamed served as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2023 to 2025, and she is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an appointed expert for the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Mohamed previously served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and as an Attorney-Adviser for human rights and refugees in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. Immediately prior to joining Berkeley Law, she was the James Milligan Fellow at Columbia Law School. Mohamed is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review and recipient of the David Berger Memorial Prize for international law. She also received a Master of International Affairs from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University in history and international affairs. She clerked for Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

Research Expertise and Interest

criminal law, international law, human rights, international criminal law

In the News

As the World Watches Ukraine, Berkeley Law Experts Discuss Recent Events and What to Expect

As the fighting in Ukraine continued Feb. 28, some of Berkeley Law’s international law experts gathered to discuss the legal and strategic implications of what’s happened — and what might come next. The hybrid roundtable drew a crowd in person and online and was moderated by Berkeley Law Professor Katerina Linos and co-sponsored by the office of Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and the school’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, where Linos is the co-faculty director.
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