Sarah Cleveland, Assistant
Professor of Law at UT since 1997, has been approved for tenure and promotion
to full professor by University President Larry Faulkner. President Faulkner’s
action came after the Law School faculty voted unanimously to recommend
tenure and promotion for Professor Cleveland.
Professor Cleveland received her undergraduate degree in 1987 from Brown University, a master's degree in 1989 from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and her law degree in 1992 from Yale Law School. Professor Cleveland clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and worked with Florida Legal Services as a "Skadden Fellow," litigating on behalf of Caribbean sugar cane workers, before joining the UT law faculty.
Professor Cleveland's scholarly and teaching interests focus on international human rights, U.S. foreign affairs and the Constitution, and federal civil procedure. Her scholarship in the first two areas has already won wide acclaim from leading scholars around the country. Among her many publications are Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Relations__G. W. L. REV.__(forthcoming 2001); Human Rights Sanctions and the World Trade Organization, in HUMAN RIGHTS, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE, F. FRANCIONI, ed., Hart Publishing (forthcoming 2001); Norm Internalization and U.S. Economic Sanctions,__YALE J. INT’L L.__(forthcoming 2000); The Plenary Power Background of Curtiss-Wright, 70 U. COL. L. REV. 1127 (1999) (symposium issue on “Foreign Affairs Law at the End of the Century); and Global Labor Rights and the Alien Tort Claims Act, 76 TEXAS L. REV. 1533 (1998).
Professor Cleveland will join a group of tenured colleagues in the international law field—including Professors Philip Bobbitt, Patricia Hansen, Steven Ratner, Gerald Torres, Russell Weintraub, and Jay L. Westbrook—that is quickly becoming recognized as one of the strongest in the nation; a 1999 survey of academics, for example, rated Texas 13th in international law in the U.S., ahead of Stanford, Northwestern, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and UCLA, among many other schools.
In addition to her outstanding scholarly achievements, Professor Cleveland has already established herself as one of the most popular classroom teachers in the school, a remarkable achievement given the strengths of the teaching faculty. The School of Law includes three members of UT's Academy of Distinguished Teachers (Dean William Powers, Jr., and Professors Steven Goode and Stanley Johanson), and has been ranked among the top ten teaching faculties in the United States for five years in a row (even being ranked first one year) based on national surveys of law student satisfaction conducted by the Princeton Review.
Dean Powers remarks, "Like our late great colleague Charles Alan Wright, Professor Cleveland embodies the excellence in scholarship and the excellence in the classroom to which we aspire in all our faculty appointments. We are fortunate, indeed, to have her as a member of this faculty."