Shirin Sinnar

Biography

Shirin Sinnar joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 2012. Her scholarship focuses on the role of institutions, including courts and executive branch agencies, in protecting individual rights and democratic values in the national security context. She has written on the capacity of Inspectors General, civil rights offices, and other institutions within federal agencies to monitor and oversee national security conduct. Her scholarship also addresses the procedural dimensions of civil rights and national security litigation, domestic intelligence-gathering and profiling, and the impact of counterterrorism policies on U.S. minority and immigrant communities. Her articles have been published in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. Sinnar teaches courses in civil procedure, advanced civil procedure, terrorism, and the intersection of race and identity with national security. In 2016, Sinnar was selected by the graduating class as the recipient of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching. Prior to her faculty appointment, Sinnar taught Legal Research and Writing and Federal Litigation to first-year law students as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow. From 2004 through 2009, she represented individuals facing discrimination based on government national security policies and unlawful employment practices, first as an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco and then as a staff attorney with the Asian Law Caucus. Sinnar previously served as a law clerk to the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School (J.D. 2003), Cambridge University (M. Phil. International Relations 1999), and Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (summa cum laude, A.B. History 1998).

Research Interest

Civil Procedure & Litigation, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Equal Protection, National Security Law