Hassan Kamal Wattoo

Hassan Kamal Wattoo is an associate at Ashtar Ali & Rahim LLP, where he focuses on constitutional law, commercial litigation, intellectual property, and civil disputes.

He previously served as law clerk to the Chief Justice of Pakistan, where he assisted with multiple judgments of national importance, and was also appointed Coordinator of the Supreme Court Law Clerkship Program Committee. Prior to this, he worked at a leading litigation firm in Lahore, where he was part of the legal team representing the victims of the 2014 Model Town killings.

Hassan is a regular columnist for Dawn, and has been featured in the New York Times, CNN International, Al Jazeera, WION News, and The Aleph Review. He has delivered a TEDx talk on the power of the written word in Pakistan and spoken internationally at events hosted by the Stanford University Centre for South Asia and SOAS, University of London. He has also served as Secretary-General of the Youth General Assembly, Pakistan.

He holds an LLB (Hons.) from SOAS, University of London, where he was President of the Law Society, and played a role in securing the release of a university alumnus and human rights activist from unlawful detention in Egypt. He also holds an LLM from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied on a merit scholarship and served as the elected LLM representative to the Student Association at Berkeley Law. He holds a keen interest in constitutional theory and judicial philosophy.