Rachel López is the James E. Beasley Professor of Law at Temple Law, where she writes and teaches in the areas of criminal law, public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, and transitional justice.
Professor López has held visiting fellowships at research institutions worldwide, including Princeton University, the Harvard Kennedy School, Yale Law School, the University of Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. In addition, she was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Global Scholar to research transitional justice in Guatemala and Spain.
Her scholarship, which has appeared or is forthcoming in law journals, such as the Columbia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Boston University Law University, Minnesota Law Review, Columbia Law Review Forum, and Virginia Law Review Online, primarily centers on state responsibility for mass atrocity, critical approaches to public international law, and the carceral state, with a particular focus on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. She is also pioneering a new genre of legal scholarship called Participatory Law Scholarship (PLS), which is written in collaboration with authors who have no formal legal training, but rather expertise in law’s injustice through lived experience. One of these works, Redeeming Justice, was awarded the 2022 Law and Society Association Article Prize. In 2024, the Virginia Law Review selected PLS as the theme of their Sixth Annual Symposium.
Recognized as an expert in criminal law and public international law, her writing and commentary have been featured in The Hill, Bloomberg News, Americas Quarterly, Scientific American, the Guardian, Just Security, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is currently a Special Advisor of the Latin American and Caribbean Law Council for the American Bar Association. From 2015 to 2019, she served as a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission, as an appointee of then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. She was appointed to co-chair the 2022 Annual Meeting for the American Society for International Law (ASIL) and is the current Chair of the AALS Section on International Human Rights. She has also testified at hearings before the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Philadelphia City Council and recently joined leading human rights experts as a co-author of the first law school textbook focused on domestic human rights in the U.S., Human Rights Advocacy in the United States (West, 2023).
Prior to joining the faculty at Temple Law, Professor López taught at Drexel Kline School of Law, where she was honored with the University President’s Civic Engagement Award for Faculty and Professional Staff, the Donna M. Murasko Teaching Award, and the inaugural Dean’s Research Fellowship. She has also clerked on the New Mexico Supreme Court and worked at the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Professor López received her B.A. in Sociology, Political Science, and International Studies from Northwestern University and her J.D. from the University of Texas, School of Law. She also has an LL.M. in French and European Law from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.