About Matthew Daniels

Matthew Daniels, JD, PhD, was raised by a single mother in a section of Spanish Harlem with the highest rate of violent crime in New York City. When Dr. Daniels was eight years old, his mother was the victim of a serious violent crime that left her partially disabled. She went on welfare and remained on a welfare income for the remainder of her life.

After attending inner-city public schools in New York City, Daniels received a full scholarship to Dartmouth College where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1985. He later received a Public Interest Law Scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he obtained both his law degree and a Master’s in Public Administration. He was subsequently awarded a doctoral fellowship in American Politics to study judicial policymaking and the rule of law at Brandeis University.

After launching an online video portal in partnership with venture capital specialist Sequoia Capital, the lead backer of YouTube and Google, Dr. Daniels received a major Templeton Foundation grant to found Good of All an international public education movement dedicated to promoting universal human rights in the Digital Age. Building from an initial base in South Korea, Good of All has launched a half dozen academic centers on three continents and has reached over 30 million people online.

Dr. Daniels is the Founder & Co-Director of the Center for Law and Digital Culture at Brunel Law School in London, England, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Handong International Law School in Pohang, South Korea. He has also served as an affiliate faculty member at the George Mason University School of Business in Washington, DC, where he developed a course on the protection of human rights online together with a team of faculty from GMU Law School and the GMU School of Business.

Dr. Daniels also founded Human Liberty, a non-profit human rights education movement to raise awareness of extreme human rights violations in countries such as North Korea. Human Liberty conceived and funded the launch of an academic center at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies and has developed educational videos documenting the suffering of North Korean refugees and labor camp survivors. Human Liberty also recruited Hogan Lovells, a leading global law firm, to produce an independent legal opinion on genocide by the North Korean regime that received extensive coverage in the UK, US and Korea and was the subject of Congressional hearings in 2014.

Dr. Daniels is the Creator and Producer of the Human Rights Network, a YouTube channel dedicated to promoting universal rights through entertainment content created by students at Good of All’s network of academic centers at educational institutions on three continents. The effectiveness of Dr. Daniels’ approach in this project has been validated by a major UK research study.

Dr. Daniels is also the author of Human Liberty 2.0: Advancing Universal Rights in the Digital Age.

Dr. Daniels currently serves as the Chair of Law & Human Rights at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC.