Shirin Sinnar

A professor at Stanford Law School since 2012, Shirin Sinnar researches the legal treatment of political violence, the procedural dimensions of civil rights litigation, and the role of institutions in protecting individual rights and democratic values in the national security context. In her year at CASBS, Sinnar plans to research the construction of terrorism as a category and set of ideas for conceptualizing and responding to political violence, with a particular focus on the role of law and legal institutions.

Her recent work assesses legal responses to hate crimes and domestic and international terrorism under U.S. law.  In 2017, she was the co-recipient of the inaugural Mike Lewis Prize for National Security Law Scholarship for her article, The Lost Story of Iqbal. Sinnar serves as a gubernatorial appointee on the California Commission on the State of Hate, a commission to assess data, support victims, and make policy recommendations related to hate crimes. She has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and other legislative bodies on hate violence and other issues. Sinnar is a member of the American Law Institute, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the editorial board of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. She received the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. Prior to her faculty appointment, Sinnar taught first-year law students as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow; served as a civil rights lawyer with the Asian Law Caucus and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco for five years; and clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School (JD), Cambridge University (M Phil International Relations), and Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges (summa cum laude, AB History).