Skip to main content
York 2010 International Conference

>> About the Participants

Kate Jastram

Prof. Kate Jastram

Faculty of Law, University of California at Berkeley

 

 

Kate Jastram joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2002.  Prior to that, she was a legal advisor to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1991 – 2001 in Geneva and in Washington, D.C.  Following graduation from Berkeley Law, she practiced immigration and nationality law in San Francisco and directed a pro bono asylum program in Minneapolis.

Prof. Jastram is an associate rapporteur of the International Association of Refugee Law Judges’ Human Rights Nexus Working Party, and has served as an expert on asylum issues for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent bi-partisan federal agency.  She is an attorney mentor for the San Francisco Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights’ asylum program.  She has worked on a variety of other projects for UNHCR and IOM, participated in the Fifth Michigan Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law (on the Right to Work), and has taught at the International Institute for Humanitarian Law in Sanremo, Italy. 

Prof. Jastram teaches courses in refugee law, international humanitarian law, global migration issues, national security and international protection, immigration law, and international human rights.  She co-wrote an amicus brief on behalf of UNHCR for the U.S. Supreme Court in Negusie v Mukasey (2009).   Her recent scholarly work includes ‘Economic Harm as a Basis for Refugee Status and the Application of Human Rights Law to the Interpretation of Economic Persecution,’ a chapter in Critical Issues in International Refugee Law (J. Simeon, ed., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010).

Prof. Jastram has a B.A. summa cum laude from San Francisco State University, an M.A.from Sarah Lawrence College, and a J.D., from the University of California, Berkeley Law School.