Caroline (Carrie) Bettinger-Lopez

Caroline Bettinger-López is a Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. She also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a recipient of a Roddenberry Fellowship for her COURAGE in Policing Project (COURAGE=Community Oriented and United Responses to Address Gender Violence and Equality).

The Human Rights Clinic, under Professor Bettinger-López’s leadership, and three South Florida-based community organizations are the joint recipients of a grant from the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund to start the Voces Unidas/Vwa Ini Project, to support low-wage immigrant women workers who have experienced workplace sexual misconduct or related retaliation.

From 2015 to 2017 Professor Bettinger-López worked in the Obama Administration, where she served as the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, a senior advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, and a member of the White House Council on Women and Girls. At the White House, her responsibilities included co-chairing the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, chairing the U.S. Government Inter-Agency Working Group on Violence Against Women, co-coordinating the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, and developing the cabinet-level North American Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls (whose inaugural meeting in October 2016 included the participation of all attorneys general and indigenous affairs cabinet members from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico).

Professor Bettinger-López’s scholarship, practice, and teaching concern international human rights law and policy advocacy, violence against women, gender and race discrimination, immigrants’ rights, and clinical legal education. She focuses on the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level, principally in the United States and Latin America. Professor Bettinger-López regularly litigates and engages in other forms of advocacy before the Inter-American Human Rights system, the United Nations, federal and state courts, and legislative bodies.