Rhonda Copelon was born in New Haven, the daughter of Herman and Katherine Copelon. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1966 and earned her law degree at Yale, graduating in 1970. She worked as an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) for a dozen years, particularly regarding cases involving reproductive rights. She successfully defended the right of African American unwed mothers to work as teacher's aides in Mississippi but lost in the challenge to the Hyde Amendment which cut Medicaid funding for abortions. After leaving the CCR in 1983, she would remain a board member the rest of her life. She was also a founding board member of the National Economic and Social Initiative, an Advisory Board member of Human Rights Watch, Women's Rights Watch, and Legal Advisor to and founder of Women's Caucus for Gender Justice. By the early 1980s, Copelon had come to realize the importance of establishing international rights as a way of protecting women's rights. She joined the faculty of the CUNY Law School at Queens College when it opened in 1983 and co-founded the International Women's Human Rights Clinic there in 1992. She would lead the fight, assisted by her captivated students, in establishing rape during war as a crime of genocide and torture. She filed countless amicus briefs in cases heard by the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and published widely on the need to treat rape during armed conflicts as a war crime.
After a four year fight against ovarian cancer, Rhonda Copelon died at her home in Manhattan. As her long-time colleague and friend, Peter Weiss, wrote in "The Nation" (5/31/10) after her death, Copelon "was the warmest of friends to her large entourage and the steeliest adversary to establishmentarians who did not recognize basic human rights.... She accomplished the impossible: she made justice look easy."
From the guide to the Rhonda Copelon Papers MS 693., 1971-2006, (Sophia Smith Collection)
