September 23, 2026

"Devoted to Peace": amNY Law Cover Feature on Sophia Romma

Professor Sophia Murashkovsky Romma, Ph.D., Esq., made the cover of amNY Law on September 23, 2026, under the headline "Devoted to Peace." The accompanying feature, "For attorney and playwright Sophia Murashkovsky Romma, law and art are a 'natural' complement," by reporter Max Parrott, runs across two pages of the print edition and explores how her work as a human rights lawyer, filmmaker, playwright and educator forms a single, continuous pursuit.

The September 23, 2026 cover of amNY Law.

The piece traces Romma's path from the experimental theater world of the Lower East Side's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club to Fordham Law School, where she enrolled in her early 40s as its oldest student to study human rights and international law. Her legal practice now specializes in refugee protection, migration law, and the rights of women and children affected by conflict, with clients across Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other former Soviet republics.

The article connects that advocacy directly to "Soul Arbitration": while producing the film, Romma lived with, ate with, and built trust among the Ukrainian women and children she interviewed in Tallinn, Estonia, work she describes as inseparable from her legal practice. "I really see those two sides of my life as one pursuit," she told amNY Law, "because whether I'm practicing or telling a story or reading a story, I'm trying to illuminate the human experience, and give voice to people who may not otherwise be heard and confront injustice."

The feature also details Romma's role as Chair of the United Nations Committee of the New York City Bar Association, where she oversees the bar's output on international legal accountability, and traces her family's own history as refugees: she arrived in the United States with her mother in 1979 at age six, fleeing discrimination against their Roma and Jewish ancestry, following grandparents who had sought asylum after her grandfather spent ten years in a Soviet gulag.

"For me, the law is at its most meaningful when it restores agency to people who might otherwise have none within the systems affecting their lives," Romma said. "It is that sacred instrument that allows you as an advocate or as a human rights attorney to provide that microphone to people so that they can speak out and not be afraid."

Original article: amNY Law — For attorney and playwright Sophia Murashkovsky Romma, law and art are a "natural" complement →

Read the full issue: Download the amNY Law print edition (PDF) →