Salma Sobhan was born in 1937 in London, England to Mohammad Ikramullah, the first foreign secretary of Pakistan and Begum Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, one of the first female members of Pakistans’ Constituent Assembly. She attended primary and secondary school in England before beginning law studies at Girton College at Cambridge in 1958. She was called to the bar in 1959 from Lincoln’s Inn and in doing so, became Pakistan’s first female barrister, working at a law firm in Karachi. In 1962, Salma married Rehman Sobhan, from Bangladesh, and moved to Dhaka to begin teaching law at the University of Dhaka. In 1974, She was appointed as a research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs, where she was responsible for editing the Supreme Court Law Reports. Over a decade later, she founded Ain O Shalish Kendra with her colleges, a human rights organization, where she served as the executive directed for 15 years. Salma received a number of awards over her lifetime for her commitment to human and women’s rights including the Ananya Magazine Award in 2000 and an award from the Human Rights First organization in 2001. Over her lifetime, she published a number of different works, including Legal Status of Women in Bangladesh, Peasants Perception of Law, and No Better Option? Women Industrial Workers. Prior to her death in 2003, she served on the Board of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the Board of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Service Trust.