Bahar Mirhosseni is a human rights and criminal defense lawyer. She co-teaches the Pretrial Justice Clinic at UCLA School of Law and she is the Senior Legal Fellow at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. She has collaborated with a range of human rights organizations including the Georgia Capital Defender Office, Southern Africa Litigation Centre, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. She serves on the Education and Racial Justice Committees of the National Association for Public Defense. Previously, she was the Associate Director of Training at Movement Law Lab where her work centered on training legal organizations, law students, legal workers, and lawyers in shifting the culture and practice of lawyering. As Program Director, at The International Legal Foundation, she worked with lawyers in the MENA region on access to justice, human rights, and high quality public defense.

She has spent over fifteen years in indigent defense, in New York and California, first through The Legal Aid Society of New York, as a public defender in Brooklyn and as a Criminal-Immigration Staff Attorney representing non-citizens, conducting select post-conviction advocacy, and advising criminal defense attorneys across New York City. As a Legal Specialist for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, she oversaw a legal education program for Palestinian law students across the West Bank. She has mentored/trained hundreds of law students and lawyers in Palestine, Tunisia, Afghanistan and the United States. She is a Senior Advocate with the Color of Excellence. She has zealously litigated thousands of cases in New York and California.

Mirhosseni received her B.A. degree with Honors from the University of California at Berkeley and in 2007, she earned her J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law. As a law student, she was awarded the Haywood Burns Fellowship in Civil and Human Rights from CUNY Law School and a Millspaugh-Catlin Fellowship in Human Rights as an Ella Baker intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Hedgebrook Writing Residency awarded her the Women Authoring Change Fellowship in honor of slain Libyan human rights advocate Salwa Bugaighis.

Selected Writings:

Women Are Leading the Resistance Against Executions in Iran | The Nation

Incarcerated Women Are Dehumanized and Overlooked, Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Says | Teen Vogue

It's Been a Year. Why Hasn't Biden Freed Eyvin Hernandez? | The Nation

Resisting Death Row: Iran, Executions, and Women’s Human Rights Activists | Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide