Professor

Saira

Mohamed

Saira Mohamed is the Agnes Roddy Robb Chair in Jurisprudence, Ethics, and Social Responsibility and Professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of international law, criminal law, and human rights, with her research primarily focused on questions of responsibility for wrongdoing in situations of armed conflict and mass atrocity. Her articles have been published in top journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, and the California Law Review. Her book What a Country Owes Its Soldiers is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. 

Mohamed has won numerous awards for her research, including the Berlin Prize. In 2025, Mohamed was awarded Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. Mohamed served as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2023 to 2025, and she is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an appointed expert for the Moscow Mechanism of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Mohamed previously served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and as an Attorney-Adviser for human rights and refugees in the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. Immediately prior to joining Berkeley Law, she was the James Milligan Fellow at Columbia Law School. Mohamed is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review and recipient of the David Berger Memorial Prize for international law. She also received a Master of International Affairs from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University in history and international affairs. She clerked for Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.