Lelia Mooney Sirotinsky

Professor Mooney is the Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of the Rule of Law (CAROLA) at Georgetown Law.

Lelia Mooney Sirotinsky

She is a renowned expert on governance and rule of law, business, human rights and sustainability, diversity and social inclusion, conflict management, and transformation, and multi-stakeholder engagement. She has over 25 years of experience managing complex projects and teams working across the Americas and also in Africa, Asia, and Europe in the context of foreign assistance and international development initiatives. Her leadership extends to the public, non-profit and private sectors leading initiatives where she has demonstrated the ability to manage multi-stakeholders, understand complex issues, and lead the implementation of global, regional, and local initiatives and solutions with academic institutions, governments, civil society organizations, networks, and local communities, the private sector and international organizations. Her work in frontier, emerging, and developing economies and conflict-affected countries combined with designing and facilitating capacity development and adult education and training initiatives with a cultural savvy, multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, human-centered, and systemic reform approach are central and unique to her teaching philosophy, research, and scholarship.


In April 2022, she was awarded the American Bar Association International Law Section Mayre Rasmussen Award for the Advancement of Women in International Law, which recognizes individuals who have achieved professional excellence in international law, encouraged women to practice international law, enabled women lawyers to attain international law job positions from which they were excluded historically or advanced opportunities for women in international law.

She currently serves as an Advisor to the Council of the American Bar Association International Law Section, the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights Business and Human Rights Working Group, the American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Law Library of Congress, and is active on several charities and multi-stakeholder platforms.


She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies (SCS) Master in Supply Chain Management and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (SFS) Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS).

She is a regular contributor at numerous conferences and panels in the United States and abroad and has lectured at the George Mason University Center for Business Civic Engagement and the Schar School of Policy and Government, the National Defense University’s William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense, the Inter-American Defense College, the University of Defense of Argentina, the Matías Delgado Business School in El Salvador and several other institutions. She served on the International Steering Committee Board of the Voluntary Principles for Business and Human Rights and the United Nations Global Compact Business for the Rule of Law Initiative. She is the author of several publications in English and Spanish including “Promoting the Rule of Law: A Practitioner’s Guide to Key Issues and Developments,” and “The Business, Human Rights and Sustainability Sourcebook,” both published by the American Bar Association. She is bilingual in English and Spanish and speaks French and Portuguese.


She holds an L.L.B. from the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste in her native Argentina, an LL.M. in Law in Developing Societies from the University of Warwick Law School in the United Kingdom, and an LL.M. General Studies from the Georgetown Law Center.