She successfully defended the right of African American unwed mothers to work as teacher's aides in Mississippi in front of the Supreme Court in Drew v.
[1][4] Copelon joined the faculty of the CUNY Law School at Queens College when it opened in 1983 and there, with Celina Romany, co-founded the International Women's Human Rights Clinic in 1992.
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.
[1][3] In the 1970s, Copelon worked with Peter Weiss, another lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights on this case, which involved a Paraguayan family whose son was tortured to death by police in Asunción.
[2] The case utilized the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act to categorize freedom from torture as a human rights norm as well as a part of the laws of the United States.