Louise Chappell (LC): Patricia, can I start by asking what influenced you to enter the field of law, and in particular international criminal law?

Patricia Viseur Sellers (PVS): I went to law school intending to practice criminal law. I attended the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, I joined the Public Defender Office in Philadelphia where I represented indigent defendants who were mainly African American and Latino in criminal proceedings. In addition to defence work, I’d always nurtured an interest in international subjects, whether it was learning languages or travelling outside of the United States. The fact that my father was an officer in the US Army meant that I travelled as a child, spending several years abroad in Germany and living on several army bases within the United States. So I had a conceptualization of the world outside of the United States, along with the breadth of the world inside the United States. For a year during my undergraduate studies at Rutgers, I lived in Mexico and attended the Autonomous University of Mexico. Between undergraduate studies and law school, I moved to Puerto Rico to work on human rights issues.

As an African American growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s, my interest in the law naturally combined with a sense of social justice. The Civil Rights Movement along with other notions of justice and equality permeated our communities, and my family discussions.