Matiangai Sirleaf, JD
Matiangai Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Sirleaf writes and teaches in the areas of global public health law, public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, post-conflict, and transitional justice and criminal law.
Sirleaf ‘s scholarly agenda is to make visible the extant hierarchies in international law and remedy the inequities reflected in it. Her work seeks to elucidate how seemingly neutral laws further global inequities. Her current research agenda sits at the crossroads between international human rights law and global public health law, where she analyzes the disproportionate distribution of highly infectious diseases and the role of international law in facilitating this result.
Another branch of her scholarship sits at the intersection of international criminal law and transitional justice. This area of Sirleaf’s scholarship proposes context-specific and locally informed approaches to providing redress to survivors of human rights violations and theorizes avenues for greater involvement of historically subordinated peoples in the making of international law. The common thread through all of her scholarship, whether examining issues of racial justice, civil and political violations, or socioeconomic violations, is responsibility. International law conceives of responsibility in narrow ways, and her scholarships seeks to render it more emancipatory.
Sirleaf’s work has been featured in leading law reviews and her commentary and reflections also appear in several online fora. She serves as executive editor at Just Security and is a member of the board of editors for the American Journal of International Law. Sirleaf is editing the first thematic print volume in a new partnership with Just Security and OUP Academic, which builds off her Racing National Security symposium. “Race & National Security” will be forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023. Sirleaf has received a number of prestigious grants, awards, fellowships, and other honors. These include the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (2019); the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics’ Health Law Scholar Selection (2019); the New York University Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award (2014); and a Fulbright Fellowship (2004).
Sirleaf previously served as an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, and a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A graduate of Yale Law School, the University of Ghana Legon Center for International Affairs, and New York University College of Arts and Sciences, Sirleaf served in a number of attorney and fellow roles before entering academia.
