Melissa Hooper

Bio

Melissa Hooper is Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, where she connects democracy scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to develop effective responses to authoritarian governance and democratic backsliding worldwide.

Before joining the law school, Hooper founded the Rule of Law Action Network at the German Marshall Fund following the dismantling of USAID and was a Senior Fellow at the Edley Center for Law and Democracy at Berkeley Law. During four years at USAID as a Senior Advisor, she counseled the National Security Council, U.S. Ambassadors, and State Department officials on rule of law, anti-corruption, European law, and democratic accountability. She also created the agency’s first program focused on democratic backsliding in consolidated democracies — working alongside lawyers and judges in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere to resist antidemocratic governance — and developed accountability mechanisms in Ukraine to combat corruption and war crimes. Prior to USAID, Hooper led accountability and policy work at Human Rights First, testifying repeatedly before Congress and shaping key legislative initiatives on Global Magnitsky sanctions, human rights protection, national security, and democratic backsliding in Central Europe, where she spent extended periods reporting on the ground.

Hooper spent more than seven years embedded with human rights lawyers and advocates in the field. Four of those years were in Russia, where she developed a nationwide strategy to protect LGBTQ+ communities and organizations threatened by the “propaganda law” and the first “foreign agent law” restricting civic groups, and helped coordinate the international defense of the Arctic 30 Greenpeace activists. She also co-led the Human Rights and Innovation Working Groups of the Bilateral Presidential Commission chaired by Presidents Obama and Medvedev. In Uzbekistan, she documented rights abuses in the aftermath of the Andijan massacre and trained defense and human rights lawyers in international law and anti-torture litigation.
For ten years, Hooper investigated and litigated capital cases at the Habeas Corpus Resource Center and the California Appellate Project, representing primarily foreign nationals from Latin America in death penalty habeas petitions and appeals. Among those cases was In re Benavides, a petition on behalf of an innocent former farmworker from Bakersfield whose conviction and death sentence were overturned by the California Supreme Court in 2018 after 26 years on death row.

Hooper holds a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law (1997), where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, Vice-President of Berkeley Law Foundation, and the recipient of a Soros Justice Postgraduate Fellowship, and a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz (1993) where she was Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Dean’s Award. She clerked for District Court Judge Janis Graham Jack in the Southern District of Texas.