Saad joins faculty at Georgetown Law
Aisha Saad is one of five new faculty members joining Georgetown Law this academic year.
“I couldn’t be happier about the outstanding legal minds who are new to our faculty this year,” Dean William M. Treanor said. “They are not only leading thinkers and researchers in their fields, but are also truly collegial individuals, dedicated to our collective mission of preparing future generations of lawyers.”
Georgetown shared more information about Professor Saad and her route to this new role:
Aisha Saad brings a wide range of experiences and influences into her work teaching torts, environmental law and corporate governance. There’s her family’s home country of Egypt, where she was born and where she returned as a young adult to help launch a master’s degree program in sustainable development at the American University in Cairo. There’s her love of nature, which started with childhood hiking trips in North Carolina and led her to major in environmental health science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And then there’s the 2000 film “Erin Brockovich,” based on a true story of an everyday woman fighting for justice on behalf of a community affected by polluted groundwater. Saad saw the movie on a plane when she was 12, and remembers it as the first thing that brought to life the possibilities of wielding law as a tool for social justice.
“Over time, as I got more exposure to the lived stories of the legal cases I was studying, I realized the disparate impact of corporate development on poor and marginalized communities and that story kept coming back into my mind – the small guy who can take on the big company,” she says.
After college, Saad went to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, staying to complete a doctorate in Geography, an interdisciplinary program that combines elements of natural and social science. Her dissertation was on corporate social responsibility, using the example of one of the largest industrial accidents in history, the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, which claimed thousands of lives and has had environmental and health repercussions in that region ever since. Following her graduation from Yale Law School, Saad completed successive law school fellowships at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. Now, joining the faculty at Georgetown Law, she feels she has found something like the interdisciplinary, international atmosphere she so appreciated at Oxford.
“It’s exciting to find colleagues who are interested in pretty much every question that I examine and students who will come to pretty much every seminar that I’ll design,” she says. “Georgetown’s really unique in embracing the core of what drew me to law – theory combined with practice. It seems like a natural home.”
