Kate Jastram is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. She has worked for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and for the Department of Homeland Security, has served as an expert on asylum for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and was part of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration’s Civil Immigration Detention Standards Advisory Task Force. She is active in the leadership of the American Society of International Law and serves on the Executive Committee of its International Refugee Law Interest Group. She won the Arthur C. Helton Human Rights Award from the American Immigration Lawyers Association in 2005, with the interdisciplinary team that wrote the USCIRF expedited removal study.
Her scholarly work has been published in the International Journal of the Red Cross, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, and the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, with book chapters in Critical Issues in International Refugee Law, Migration and International Legal Norms, and Refugee Protection in International Law. Her most recent article is Climate Change and Cross-Border Displacement: What the Courts, the Administration, and Congress Can Do to Improve Options for the United States (forthcoming, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law). She is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Refugee Law.
Education
B.A., San Francisco State University summa cum laude
M.A., Sarah Lawrence College
J.D., Berkeley Law
Kathryn J Jastram is teaching the following course in Spring 2024:
• 288.43 sec. 001 - Climate Refugees? Responding to Climate Displacement