Living Out a Dream — Abroad
Law professor Catherine Powell takes interest in human rights to Israel
By Kendra Hamilton

The faint of heart might think Catherine Powell, professor of law at New York's Fordham University and former executive director of Columbia University's Human Rights Institute, has chosen an odd location to bear her first child: Jerusalem.

But Powell's work as a human rights warrior — suing, along with her students, the United States and China for human rights violations; winning clemency for Kemba Smith, the Hampton University student sentenced to 25 years in prison for a minor role in her boyfriend's drug trafficking ring — reveal her to be anything but faint of heart, and she maintains an upbeat attitude about life in the Middle East.

"It's not as bad as it seems on CNN," she says, adding, "There's a sense of calm here" that Americans would find quite surprising.

Indeed, both for Powell, who won a Soros Senior Fellowship from the Open Society Institute to support her sojourn in Israel, and for her husband, Mark Quarterman, who's the chief staffer for the U.N. special envoy to the Middle East peace process, there could not be a more exciting time to be in Jerusalem.

"My project involves looking at the role of human rights organizations in the debate about the U.S. war on terrorism," Powell says. "Because Israel is also involved in a war on terrorism, there are a lot of similar issues.

"So even though on the one hand it's a time of anxiety because of the conflict here and the anticipated war against Iraq, on the other hand it's also a useful time. I'm gathering a lot of information."

For Powell, the work in Israel constitutes the final phase, the scholarship phase, of what has been a three-stage project. Powell began with a concern that had animated much of her work at Columbia's Human Rights Institute: what she perceived as the failure of domestic civil rights law and rhetoric to adequately incorporate the law and rhetoric of the international human rights movement.