Professor E. Tendayi Achiume is an international legal scholar focusing on international human rights law, international refugee law and international migration law. Her academic research explores the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism and other forms of empire for the governance of international migration. In recognition of the “exceptional creativity” and “promise for important future advances,” of Achiume’s research in these areas, she was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant”. She is also an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria; a Research Associate with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand; and a Research Associate with the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. Professor Achiume will spend the 2024-2025 academic year as a scholar in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In November 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Achiume the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, making her the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993. In 2016, she was appointed to co-chair the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), and she is former co-chair of the ASIL Migration Law Interest Group. In 2021, she was appointed to the American Journal of International Law Board of Editors and in 2022 selected as a commissioner for the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health.

Before coming to Stanford Law, she was the inaugural Alicia Miñana Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020, UCLA’s highest honor for excellence in teaching, as well as the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. She also served as a faculty director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights.

Achiume clerked for Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Following her clerkships, she was awarded the Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship to work for the Refugee and Migrant Rights Project unit at Lawyers for Human Rights in Johannesburg. She also taught on the faculty of the International Human Rights Exchange Programme based at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Achiume has published widely and her scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in, among others, the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Lancet Journal, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Stanford Law Journal, the UCLA Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal,

She earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She also earned a Graduate Certificate in International Development Studies from Yale University, and an International Baccalaureate Diploma from the United World Colleges (UWC), Atlantic College.