Tendayi Achiume is Assistant Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. Her research and teaching interests lie in international human rights law, international refugee law, comparative immigration law, international criminal justice, and property.
Professor Achiume earned her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. While at law school, she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Development Studies from Yale. She served as Managing Editor of Submissions for the Yale Journal of International Law and was a recipient of the Fox International Fellowship, and the Howard M. Holtzmann Fellowship in International Arbitration and Dispute Resolution.
Professor Achiume clerked for Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Following her clerkships, she was awarded the Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship to work for the Refugee and Migrant Rights Project unit at Lawyers for Human Rights in Johannesburg. Professor Achiume also taught on the faculty of the International Human Rights Exchange Programme based at the University of the Witswatersrand. She then joined the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP as a litigation associate. Immediately prior to her current appointment she was the second recipient of Binder Clinical Teaching Fellowship at UCLA School of Law.
Professor Achiume was recently appointed as co-Chair of the 2016 American Society of International Law Annual Meeting. Her publications include “Syria and the Responsibility to Protect Refugees,” 100 Minnesota Law Review _, (forthcoming 2015), “Beyond Prejudice: Structural Xenophobic Discrimination Against Refugees," in 45(2) Georgetown Journal of International Law 323 (2014); and a co-authored piece, “Prison Conditions in South Africa and the Role of Public Interest Litigation Since 1994” in 27(1) South African Journal of Human Rights 183 (2011).