简介

Professor Stephen Meili writes and teaches about the rights of non-citizens, particularly those seeking asylum. His recent publications include the right not to hold a political opinion as the basis for asylum (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, forthcoming in 2015) and the impact of human rights treaties on asylum jurisprudence in Canada and the United Kingdom (Osgoode Hall Law Journal 2014 and Vanderbilt Transnational Law Journal 2015, respectively). He has also co-authored (with his U of M colleague David Weissbrodt) two works on human rights issues: “Recent Developments in the Human Rights of Trafficked Persons,” in Human Rights and Migration: Trafficking for Forced Labour (2012) and “Human Rights and Protection of Non-Citizens: Whither Universality and Indivisibility of Rights?” (Refugee Survey Quarterly, 2010). His current research projects include a comparative study of the detention of asylum-seekers in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as the treatment of Colombians who have sought asylum in Ecuador. He has also published extensive scholarship on cause lawyering in comparative perspective. His research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Robina Foundation. Professor Meili has been an Academic Visitor at the Faculty of Law at Oxford University, as well as a Senior Associate Member at Oxford’s St. Antony’s College. He has taught classes to students at all of the law schools in Medellin, Colombia as part of a USAID-funded clinical education program, as well as Uppsala University in Sweden. In addition to teaching in the areas of human rights and immigration law, civil procedure and legal practice at the University of Minnesota, Professor Meili has expertise and experience in several other areas of the law. These include consumer protection, based on his 17 years as Director of the Consumer Law Litigation Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School, labor law, based on being a partner in an employment law firm in Harford, Connecticut prior to entering academia, and environmental law, based on his graduate fellowship at Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Meili also serves as Director of the Law School’s Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, where students represent asylum-seekers and detained individuals in various immigration and appellate court proceedings. Over the seven years that he has been its Director, the IHR Clinic has obtained asylum or other forms of protection for applicants from Cameroon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Iran, Liberia, and Sudan. In addition, the Clinic, which is part of the Law School’s Center for New Americans, has been involved in numerous outreach and education projects involving the Somali community in the Twin Cities.