Professor Powell is the Eunice Hunton Carter Distinguished Research Scholar Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. Her one-year term was made possible through generous funding from the Mellon Foundation. During her stint as the Constitutional Accountability Center’s second Scholar-in-Residence, Powell is studying the implications of emerging technologies for civil rights and civil liberties and is participating in the life of CAC’s ongoing work in litigation, communications, and collaboration with progressive movement partners.

Professor Powell is an award-winning expert on questions of equality theory in constitutional law and human rights law. She has worked on these matters in the White House under both Presidents Obama and Biden as well as on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s State Department Policy Planning Staff. Building on her background in equality law, her current work focuses on how the digital economy is restructuring our relationships with each other, with the state, and even with ourselves (in how we perform and express ourselves online) and the implications of this for law. While working in the first-ever White House Gender Policy Council in 2025, she helped implement an executive order on artificial intelligence and support work on the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse. More broadly, her work explores matters concerning equality law, belonging, and inclusion.

Powell coined the term “Color of Covid” through a series of CNN op-eds and a Yale Journal of Law and Feminism law review article. Previously, Professor Powell was on the Columbia Law School faculty, where she was a clinical professor as founding director of the Human Rights Clinic and the Human Rights Institute. At Fordham Law, she teaches constitutional law, human rights, feminist theory, and civil rights in a digital age. She has also served on various boards, including the Human Rights Watch board of directors and the American Journal of International Law board of editors. Other previous leadership positions include her roles as Vice President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and co-chair of Blacks in ASIL (BASIL).

She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal. She has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. After her graduate work, she was a post-graduate Ford fellow in teaching international law at Harvard Law School and then clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand on the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.