Noura Erakat

Noura Erakat was born on 16 January 1980 in Alameda County, California, to a Palestinian family. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley — graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 2002 and taking her JD at Berkeley Law in 2005 — and later earned an LLM in national security from Georgetown University Law Center. Before entering academia she worked as national organiser and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, as legal counsel to a subcommittee of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform from 2007 to 2009, and as legal advocacy coordinator at the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights from 2010 to 2013. In 2010 she co-founded Jadaliyya, the online magazine of the Arab Studies Institute. She is professor of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Her book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) reads a century of the conflict — from the Balfour Declaration to the wars on Gaza — through five legal junctures, arguing that law has no force independent of politics yet remains a terrain on which the Palestinian struggle can be waged. It won the 2019 Palestine Book Awards. A prominent public commentator, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, and in May 2025 she addressed the United Nations at the 77th commemoration of the Nakba.

Key works

• Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures (co-edited with Mouin Rabbani, 2013)
• Gaza in Context — pedagogical project and short documentary (2016)
• Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (2019)

Sources

• Noura Erakat — Rutgers University faculty profile
• Justice for Some — Stanford University Press