Director

Director, Loyola Genocide Justice Clinic
Founders Hall 209
213.736.8348
rajika.shah@lls.edu

Rajika Shah

Courses Taught

• Loyola Genocide Justice Clinic
• Law and Genocide
• Comparative Religion and the Law

Education

• BA, Oberlin College
• JD, magna cum laude, Pepperdine University School of Law
• LLM with Distinction in Public International Law, London School of Economics and Political Science

Background

Rajika L. Shah is the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Genocide at Loyola Law School, where she also runs the Loyola Genocide Justice Clinic. Prior to joining Loyola, Rajika litigated international human rights and property restitution cases on behalf of Armenian and Sudanese genocide victims, indigenous groups, and religious and ethnic minorities. She has represented plaintiffs in numerous complex and high-stakes disputes against foreign sovereigns and commercial entities, at both the trial and appellate levels. She also represented Libyan terrorist hijacking victims before the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

Rajika has extensive research experience through her work with the Oxford University Press. She was instrumental in building and developing Oxford Reports on International Law (ORIL), the most comprehensive fully indexed and searchable database of international case law and scholarly commentary across a wide variety of international law subjects. Separately, she served as Managing Editor of the European Court of Human Rights module of ORIL, and authored case reports on a range of admissibility and merits decisions from UN human rights treaty bodies for the UN human rights module.

While interning with the U.S. State Department’s Office of War Crimes Issues (now the Office of Global Criminal Justice), Rajika traveled as part of official U.S. delegations to the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. She also completed internships at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (Los Angeles Immigration Court), and externed for the Hon. Terry J. Hatter of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Rajika received her LL.M. in Public International Law with Distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where her team were semifinalists in the Jean Pictet Competition in international humanitarian law, held in Vrnjačka Banja, Serbia. 

She is admitted to practice in California, the U.S. District Court for the Central and Northern Districts of California, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second and Ninth Circuits. Rajika is also a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and is active in the Council’s Gitmo Taskforce.

Publications

• R. Shah, “The Role of Law in Enabling Postgenocide Healing: Assessing the Importance of Restitution,” in KlejdaMulaj et al., eds., GENOCIDE RECONSIDERED:DECONSTRUCTIVE THOUGHTS FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY ENCOUNTERS(forthcoming)
• M. Bazyler, L. Boyd, R. Shah, K. Nelson, SEARCHING FOR JUSTICE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST:FULFILLING THE TEREZIN DECLARATION AND POST-HOLOCAUSTIMMOVABLE PROPERTY RESTITUTION(Oxford Univ. Press 2019)
• R. Shah, Assessing the Atrocities: Early Indications of Potential International Crimes Stemming from the 2017 Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis, 41 Loy. L.A. Int’l & Comp. L. Rev. 181 (2018)
• R. Shah, The Making of California’s Art Recovery Statute: The Long Road to Section 338(c)(3), 20 Chapman L. Rev. 1 (2017)
• M. Bazyler and R. Shah, The Unfinished Business of the Armenian Genocide: Armenian Property Restitution and U.S. Courts, 23 Southwestern J. Int’l L. 101 (2017)
• K. Nelson and R. Shah, An Immovable Property Restitution Legislation Database: ESLI’s Initiative to Bring Present and Future Meaning to the Terezin Declaration Commitments, Vol. XIII No. 2, Limes+ 101 (2015)