International and Comparative Law Research Scholars

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Bio: Luís Armando Saboya Amara is a Brazilian lawyer and professor. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Fortaleza, a postgraduate degree in business law and management from the University of Fortaleza, and a master’s degree in constitutional law from the University of Fortaleza. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in commercial law at the University of São Paulo.

Research Focus: Luis’ research focuses on the rights of minority shareholders in cases of judicial recovery.

Languages: Portuguese (native), Spanish (fluent), French (beginner-level proficiency).

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Bio: Camila Brenda Calvo is a legal scholar and practitioner specializing in criminal law and wrongful conviction. She earned her law degree from Torcuato Di Tella University and holds an LLM from the University of Michigan. As Project Coordinator and staff attorney at Innocence Project Argentina, she has focused her career on defending wrongfully convicted individuals and addressing systemic flaws in the Argentine criminal justice system.

Camila is a professor in the legal clinic at the University of San Andrés and has taught courses on forensic science and miscarriages of justice at the University of Palermo and the National University of La Plata. She serves on the Executive Board of the Innocence Network and is a member of its International Committee. Her academic contributions include co-authoring the chapter “Miscarriages of Justice in Argentina” in Murder, Wrongful Conviction, and the Law: An International Comparative Analysis (Routledge 2023).

Research Focus: Camila’s research addresses the urgent need for uniform evidentiary standards in Argentina’s criminal justice system. Her work focuses on creating model rules of evidence to enhance the reliability of evidence used in court. By examining the Federal Rules of Evidence in the United States and comparing them with Argentina’s legal traditions, she aims to develop comprehensive evidentiary norms tailored to Argentina’s unique challenges.

Languages: Spanish (native), German (basic).

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Bio: Valentina Emanuele is a PhD candidate in the doctoral program in International Business Taxation (DIBT) at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). She is also a teaching and research associate at the same Institute, where she teaches international tax law in courses for bachelor’s and master’s students.

Valentina holds a law degree from the University of Milano-Bicocca and a postgraduate master’s degree in Tax Law from the Cattolica University of Milan. 

Before her PhD, she worked as a tax consultant in transfer pricing at EY Milan. She also passed the bar exam at the Court of Milan.

Research Focus: Valentina’s research addresses the inadequacy of the current international tax system to allocate taxing rights among countries. The main issue with the existing rules is the physical presence requirement, which is unable to capture value in the current global digital market. Her research aims to investigate the concept of “value creation” and examine how businesses add value and create profit in the digital economy. The goal is to rewrite and redesign the structure and mechanism of double tax treaties to allocate taxing rights where value is created, even without a physical presence.

Languages: Italian (native), French (basic).

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Bio: Jiwon Jheong has been a presiding judge of Geochang Branch of Changwon District Court of the Republic of Korea since 2020. She served as an associate judge of Seoul Central District Court from 2018 to 2020, and served as an associate judge of Ansan Branch of Suwon District Court from 2015 to 2018. She worked as a law clerk at Seoul High Court from 2014 to 2015. 

Before entering her profession, from 2012 to 2013, she was assigned to the two-year program at the Supreme Court of Korea’s Judicial Research and Training Institute. As a judge and a former law clerk, she has dealt with a wide range of labor cases as well as civil and criminal cases. She won 2020, 2021 Outstanding Judge of the Year by Gyeongsangnam-province Bar Association. 

Jiwon is also a member of the Labor Law Community of the Supreme Court of Korea. She is one of the co-authors of the revised edition of “The Commentary on the Trade Unions and Labor Relations Adjustment Act (TULRAA),” a notable legal commentary in Korea.

She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Seoul National University College of Humanities in 2012 and a master of laws degree in administrative law from Seoul National University School of Law in 2018. 

Research Focus: Jiwon’s research first focuses on the criteria for deciding an appropriate bargaining unit in the US legal system. Korea’s collective bargaining system is unique in that the TULRAA defines the bargaining unit as a business or workplace. However, the Labor Relations Commission (LRC) may divide the bargaining unit if there is any considerable disparity in working conditions, employment status, and bargaining practices. As there is a scarcity of precedents on the separation criteria of bargaining units, she hopes to deepen her understanding of the concrete criteria for determining an appropriate bargaining unit in the United States.

The second part of her research focuses on the legal principle of joint employment in the United States. A segment of Korean legal society argues that the adoption of the US approach will represent an expansion of the nature of employers as a party to collective bargaining compared to the currently dominant interpretation under TULRAA. Scrutinizing the legal principle of joint employment in the United States will provide an additional perspective on the concept of an employer in a collective bargaining setting and determining whether it is possible to expand the concept of a client company in an in-house subcontracting relationship. 

Languages:  Korean (native), Chinese (intermediary), Japanese (elementary).

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Bio: Mateusz Kaźmierczak is an attorney at law and PhD student at the University of Gdańsk, where he teaches income tax law. Mateusz is the author of several articles in the field of international taxation, focusing on the impacts of the digital economy.

Research Focus: Mateusz’s research focus is the taxation of income from digital services. In particular, he examines the impact of data on income, the occurrence of windfall profits in the digital economy and their underlying reasons, and the limits of unilateral changes to domestic tax law to address the problems arising from digital services. He argues that only unilateral solutions can realistically affect how income from digital services is taxed. However, given the experience of Digital Services Taxes introduced in Europe, they are not the optimal solution.

Languages: Polish (native), German (advanced).

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Bio: Sophia Kubo is a PhD student at the Chair of Private Law, Private International Law and Comparative Law (Professor Martin Gebauer) at the University of Tuebingen (Germany), where she is also working as a research assistant since 2022. She has studied law at the University of Tuebingen and graduated in 2022 with a specialization in private international law, international civil litigation and comparative law. After having participated in the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court in 2017/2018, she coached the university’s team in 2019-20 and 2023-24.

Sophia currently works on her thesis regarding interim relief in international commercial arbitration. Apart from her doctoral thesis she is also working as a research assistant for an independent arbitrator. In this capacity, she has been appointed as tribunal secretary in several domestic and international arbitrations.

Sophia’s interests include private international law, international civil litigation and comparative law.

Research Focus: Sophia’s research is centered around the relationship between state courts and arbitral tribunals during the different stages of interim relief proceedings. She focuses on questions of jurisdiction and the (cross-border) enforcement of interim measures ordered by arbitral tribunals. During her stay in Michigan, she will explore the approaches taken by the courts in the United States towards jurisdiction and enforcement. The goal of her project is to analyze and compare the different approaches in these fields from a transnational perspective.

Languages: German (native), French (intermediate), Japanese (intermediate).

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Bio: Thomas Mollenhauer is a PhD student at University of Freiburg Law School (Germany), where he also worked as a research assistant for Professor Johannes Masing at the Department of Constitutional Law from 2021 to 2024. He studied law at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Paris XII. After his graduation, he completed his legal clerkship at the Higher Regional Court of Karlsruhe. During his legal clerkship, he worked at a major law firm focusing on public law and at the European Commission in the Rule of Law Unit of the Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers. In his position as research assistant, he taught first- and second-year students in constitutional law and European law.

He currently works on his thesis regarding fundamental rights protection of judicial independence in Europe. His doctoral research is funded by the German Protestant Academic Foundation.

Thomas’ research interests include European law, constitutional law and comparative law.

Research Focus: The “rule of law crisis,” and, more specifically, the threats against the independence of the courts in some Member States, as formerly in Poland or still today in Hungary, are challenging the legal system of the European Union and the system of protection of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Against this background Thomas explores in his PhD project how fundamental rights can be used as an instrument to protect judicial independence in Europe. The central and highly controversial question is whether and to what extent the European courts (ECJ and ECtHR) are competent to rule on questions of the independence of the national courts. Also, in substantive terms, a European consensus on the meaning of “judicial independence” has not yet been reached. The courts have only just begun to develop on this concept and many aspects are still unresolved. In his PhD project, Thomas therefore aims to reconstruct and develop a European standard of judicial independence that takes into account the federal nature of the European multilevel system. During his research stay at Michigan Law School, he wants to reflect on the concept of judicial independence from an US perspective. Thomas hopes that the United States’ long and rich experience with federalism will be of great assistance when conceptualizing a European standard of judicial independence, as a pluralistic solution must be found.

Languages: German (native), Spanish (fluent), French (fluent).

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Bio: Tomohiro Otonashi is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Law at Kyoto University in Japan. Otonashi also participates in a project called Medical DX and the Law at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy established at the Graduate School, where he addresses medical databases and AI medical devices from the viewpoint of privacy. His work on information privacy was awarded the KDDI Foundation Award 2023.

Otonashi graduated from Kyoto University Law School and passed the bar exam. He also wrote his doctoral dissertation in the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Law, and upon graduation, he began working in his current position. His work has been published in prominent Japanese law journals.

Research Focus: Otonashi explores the right to information privacy with reference to cases and discussions in the United States and Japan. He examines in detail the “appropriate handling of personal information” approach, which replaces the “notice and choice (regarding the handling of personal information)” approach that has been conventionally dominant, and attempts to concretize or structure the method of determining whether the handling of information is appropriate and the content of appropriate handling. His research tries to analyze it from the perspective of “protecting personal information in order to maintain and promote the use of personal information.”

Languages: Japanese (native).

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Bio: Isis Rezegh received her law degree from the University of Vienna (Austria). During her diploma studies, she was awarded several merit-based scholarships and graduated in the top quintile of the academic year of 2020-21. Isis is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Tax Law (Chair of Professor Caroline Heber) at the University of Vienna, where she also works as a teaching and research assistant. Isis has previously worked as an associate in a renowned Viennese law firm and completed a traineeship at the Vienna Higher Regional Court. She also served as a political affairs intern at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC. Isis is a member of the International Fiscal Association and the Aris Juris Vienna (Advanced Research School in Law and Jurisprudence).

Research Focus: Isis’ research focuses on VAT, European and international tax law and corporate taxation. Within her dissertation, entitled “Taxation and Market Failure,” Isis examines how taxes can be used as a tool to address crises and market inefficiencies, particularly within the European Internal Market. She investigates whether legislators shall use taxes to stabilize markets, comparing the European and US approaches. Isis’ work analyzes excess profit taxes as crisis management tools, aiming to develop effective tax policies that enhance market resilience and economic recovery.

Languages: German (native), French (upper intermediate).

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Bio: Benjamin Ruiz García is a research fellow at the Surrey Center for Law and Philosophy (United Kingdom) and adjunct faculty at the ITAM School of Law (Mexico). He has studied Legal Philosophy at UCLA and Surrey. He earned scholarships from the UCLA School of Law (United States), the University of Surrey School of Law (United Kingdom), and CONAHCYT (Mexico). His teaching activities include courses on Jurisprudence, Public, and Criminal Law. In addition, he has taught seminars on Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, Hart’s Concept of Law, Legal Realism (American and Scandinavian), and Normative Philosophy. His writings focus on conceptual analysis, the philosophical foundations of Law and Economics, and the rationales and justifications of the right to silence in the Civil Law and the Common Law. 

Currently, he is translating into Spanish the main works of the new legal anti-positivism, including Scott Hershovitz’s Moral Practice Picture of Law and Mark Greenberg’s Moral Impact Theory of Law.

Research Focus: Benjamin’s research focuses on the artifactual theories of law, the new legal anti-positivism (Ronald Dworkin, Nicolaos Stavropoulos, Mark Greenberg, and Scott Hershovitz), and the eliminativist pictures in jurisprudence. He is developing a theory–the Hybrid Artifactual Picture of Law–according to which legal institutions are social constructions. However, it contends that legal rights and obligations do not have distinctively ontological features. Instead, they are moral in nature.

Languages: Spanish (native).

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Bio: Ye Yabing is a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University Law School. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned a master’s degree in European and international law from Hamburg University, a juris master’s degree in comparative law from China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), and a bachelor’s degree in law from Nanjing Agricultural University (NAU).

She has contributed to several significant research programs, including the Chinese National Social Science Fund General Project “Research on the Movables and Rights Guarantee System in the Chinese Civil Code.” Ye has gained valuable experience through internships at Beijing Zhonglun Law Firm, Linklaters LLP, and Beijing Rongying Law Firm.

Currently, she serves as the associate editor of Tsinghua Law Review and an Editor of Tisnghua China Law Review. Additionally, she is an active member of the Beijing Comparative Law Association and the Beijing Entertainment Law Society. Ye has published numerous academic papers in leading Chinese law journals.

Research Focus: Ye’s research focuses on the statutory super liens, which are special claims on a debtor’s property that take precedence over agreed security interests and ordinary claims by law. Her study addresses the following key issues:

1. Categorization of statutory super liens: Are they efficiency-oriented or welfare-oriented?
2. The nature of statutory super liens.
3. The necessity, legitimacy, and reasonableness of statutory super liens.
4. Whether the lien’s applicable scope should be limited to the increment of the property.
5. The ranking among different statutory super liens, especially in bankruptcy scenarios.

Languages: Mandarin Chinese (native) and German (elementary).

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Bio: Zhao Chun is currently a PhD candidate in Economic Law at the Law School of Renmin University of China. He received his undergraduate degree from the Business School of Renmin University of China and his master’s degree from the Law School of Renmin University of China. He also spent half a year on exchange study at the Louvain School of Management UCL, Belgium.

He passed the Chinese Judicial Examination and four subjects of the Chinese Certified Public Accountant Examination.

He was an intern at King & Wood Mallesons and DBS Bank (Beijing office), where he was involved in debt issuance and listing of large financial institutions such as Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, CICC, etc. He has handled legal practices, such as anti-money laundering compliance and financial consumer protection.

Research Focus: In recent years, the idea of ESG has drawn widespread attention around the world. China’s corporate social responsibility norms have shown a tendency to become more explicit and legalized in the newly amended-Companies Law, 2023.

Chun’s research will aim to answer three questions: Firstly, the nature of ESG governance norms in corporate law, whether they are enabling or mandatory norms? Secondly, if ESG governance norms are mandatory norms, what is their legitimacy? Thirdly, what is the role of directors in ESG corporate governance and how to assign ESG oversight obligations to directors?

Languages:  Mandarin (native).

Bio: Luís Armando Saboya Amora is a Brazilian lawyer and professor. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Fortaleza, a postgraduate degree in Business Law and Management from the University of Fortaleza, and a master’s degree in Constitutional Law from the University of Fortaleza. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in Commercial Law at the University of São Paulo.

Research Focus: Luis’ research focuses on the rights of minority shareholders in cases of Judicial Recovery.

Languages: Portuguese (native), Spanish (fluent), French (beginner-level proficiency)

Bio: Maxim Bönnemann is a research fellow at Humboldt University Berlin and the Kassel Institute for Sustainability. In 2022 he defended his PhD in the law and politics of Special Economic Zones at Humboldt University for which he was awarded the Law School Prize for Best Dissertation in Public Law. Since 2021, he has also been a permanent editor of the Verfassungsblog, covering comparative constitutional and environmental law. Maxim has been a visiting researcher at the National Law University, Delhi, and at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). Before his legal studies, he worked for a human rights NGO in Moscow. Maxim has authored several papers and book chapters on comparative legal theory and has edited a book on “The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law” (OUP, 2020).

Research Focus: Maxim’s main research interests lie in comparative legal theory, political institutions and international economic law. During his stay at Michigan he will pursue a project on the role of non-majoritarian institutions in environmental and climate governance, in addition to a comparative project on the evolution of national Special Economic Zone laws.

Languages: German (native), Russian (proficient), French (elementary)

Bio: Jonathan Bonnitcha is an Associate Professor, in Law at the University of New South Wales. He holds the degrees of DPhil, MPhil and BCL from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar, and the degrees of LLB and BEc from the University of Sydney.

Jonathan’s research examines international and domestic legal regimes governing foreign investment. He is the author of two books on investment treaties, including (with Lauge Poulsen and Michael Waibel) The Political Economy of the Investment Treaty Regime.

Much of Jonathan’s research is inter-disciplinary. His article (with Emma Aisbett) ‘A Pareto Improving Compensation Rule for Investment Treaties’ won the John Jackson prize for the best article published in the Journal of International Economic Law in 2021. A forthcoming article (with Zoe Phillips Williams) in Law & Policy empirically examines the impact of investment treaties on domestic governance in developing countries, through cross-country quantitative analysis and a detailed qualitative case-study on Myanmar.

Research: Jonathan is currently working on two research projects. The first (with Taylor St John) is a comparative study of domestic investment laws. The project seeks to identify and explain shifts in the functions and content of national investment laws over time and space. The second (with Zhenyu Xiao) uses a series of case studies from across the Belt and Road Initiative to explore the legal and political dynamics in renegotiation of infrastructure contracts between Chinese foreign investors and host governments.

Languages: Spanish (intermediate); Burmese (basic)

Bio: Mireille is a doctoral student in legal history and civil law at Université Laval’s Faculty of Law in cotutelle with the Sciences Po Law School in Paris. She is a member of the Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques. Mireille holds a bachelor’s degree in civil law and common law from the McGill Faculty of Law (2016) and a master’s degree in law and society from the University of Victoria (2018). Her master’s thesis focused on the intellectual contexts of the 1900 Comparative Law Congress in Paris. A member of the Quebec Bar since 2018, she worked as a law clerk at the Quebec Court of Appeal from 2018 to 2020. 

Research Focus: Mireille’s research focuses on the contributions of civil society to the development of the civil law in the controversy over the nature and origins of legal personality in 19th-century France. In particular she looks at the way legal arguments published by lawyers and non-lawyers in the public press contribute to transforming the formal legal landscape in caslaw and doctrinal works. She is interested in developing a law and humanities research framework that can be applied in civil law countries, by mobilizing existing French-language theoretical resources and translating some English theoretical pieces to French.

Languages: French, Spanish

Bio: Jiwon Jheong has been a presiding judge of Geochang Branch of Changwon District Court of the Republic of Korea since 2020. She served as an associate judge of Seoul Central District Court from 2018 to 2020, and served as an associate judge of Ansan Branch of Suwon District Court from 2015 to 2018. She worked as a law clerk at Seoul High Court from 2014 to 2015. Before entering her profession, from 2012 to 2013, she was assigned to the two-year program at the Supreme Court of Korea’s Judicial Research and Training Institute. As a judge and a former law clerk, she has dealt with a wide range of labor cases as well as civil and criminal cases. She won 2020, 2021 Outstanding Judge of the Year by Gyeongsangnam-province Bar Association. 

Jiwon is also a member of the Labor Law Community of the Supreme Court of Korea. She is one of the co-authors of the revised edition of “The Commentary on the Trade Unions and Labor Relations Adjustment Act (TULRAA)”, a notable legal commentary in Korea.

She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Seoul National University College of Humanities in 2012 and a Master of Laws degree in administrative law from Seoul National University School of Law in 2018. 

Research Focus: Jiwon’s research first focuses on the criteria for deciding an appropriate bargaining unit in the U.S. legal system. Korea’s collective bargaining system is unique in that the TULRAA defines the bargaining unit as a business or workplace. However, the Labor Relations Commission (LRC) may divide the bargaining unit if there is any considerable disparity in working conditions, employment status, and bargaining practices. As there is a scarcity of precedents on the separation criteria of bargaining units, she hopes to deepen her understanding of the concrete criteria for determining an appropriate bargaining unit in the U.S. 

The second part of her research focuses on the legal principle of joint employment in the U.S. A segment of Korean legal society argues that the adoption of the U.S. approach will represent an expansion of the nature of employers as a party to collective bargaining compared to the currently dominant interpretation under TULRAA. Scrutinizing the legal principle of joint employment in the U.S. will provide an additional perspective on the concept of an employer in a collective bargaining setting and determining whether it is possible to expand the concept of a client company in an in-house subcontracting relationship. 

Languages: Korean (native), Chinese (intermediary), Japanese elementary)

Bio: Dr. Muhammad Asif Khan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Law at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities in the National University of Science and Technology Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also the Head of the Department of Law. He holds an LL.B. from University of Peshawar (Pakistan), and an LL.M. from the University of Liverpool (UK) in Public International Law. He defended his PhD thesis “Adjusting Business Entities in a Globalized World: The Concept of an International Treaty Regulating Transnational Corporations against Violations of International Law” at the University of Salzburg (Austria) in May 2015. He has vast experience in teaching Public International Law and has served in different public sector universities in Pakistan. He has worked as a consultant with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Pakistan. He has also worked as a Business and Human Rights Specialist with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the Decentralisation, Human Rights and Local Governance Project (DHL) in Pakistan. He has remained a member of the governance committee of teaching business and human rights forum for one year (2021-2022). He is an associate editor of the Manchester Journal of Transnational Islamic Law and Practice and the NUST Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities. His teaching activities include undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Public International Law, International Humanitarian Law, Business and Human Rights, Human Rights Law and Jurisprudence.

Research Focus: Dr. Khan’s research activities focus on Business and Human Rights along with issues related with International Humanitarian Law including cyber warfare. Previously, his research has focussed on the regulation of transnational corporations and other business entities through an international treaty. At Michigan he will be focussing on human rights protection through international investment law. The major outcome will be to explore the possibility of including human rights protection clauses in bilateral investment treaties and international investment agreements from the perspectives of South Asian states. 

Languages: Pashto (native), Urdu and English

Bio: Kana Koyasu is a public prosecutor in Japan. She graduated from Waseda Law School with a Juris Doctor degree. After she passed the Japanese Bar Exam, she was appointed Public Prosecutor in December 2017 and has been working at the Sapporo District Public Prosecutors Office since 2023. She has been working in both the criminal and trial division of a number of District Public Prosecutors Offices for six years, gaining experience as a public prosecutor.

As a practicing lawyer, she has handled a number of difficult and complex criminal cases and has successfully prosecuted and argued a number of them. She was recommended by the Public Prosecutors Office in Japan and is currently beginning studies and research at the University of Michigan Law School as a research scholar.

Research Focus: Kana’s research focuses on recent developments in the legislation and practice of the criminal justice system in the U.S. In general, the U.S. is much quicker than other countries in reflecting changes in socioeconomic conditions in its legal systems and practice. There are many lessons that Japan should learn in order to timely catch socioeconomic changes and expeditiously take legislative and other actions in line with such changes. A general study of such recent legislation and its practice will be indispensable for the future development of the criminal justice system in Japan.

Languages: Japanese (native)

Bio: Isola Clara Macchia is a Ph.D. Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her Ph.D. project investigates how the European Union enforces sustainable development clauses in its Free Trade Agreements, and whether variations in enforcement can be detected. She holds a Law degree from the University of Bologna and an MSc in European and International Public Policy from the London School of Economics. Isola Clara is a member of the Jean Monnet Module “Reforming the Global Economic Governance: The EU for SDGs in International Economic Law” research team at the University of Bologna, funded by the European Union. Before her Ph.D., she worked at the European Commission in the Directorate-General for Employment as a trainee on Directives’ implementation and infringement proceedings. She also served as a researcher at the Attorney General’s Office in Bologna working on regional cooperation in law enforcement and as a research assistant in international law at the University of Bologna. 

Research Focus: At Michigan Law School, Isola Clara’s research will focus on the comparison between the EU’s and U.S.’ approaches to enforcing international law, specifically in the area of trade and sustainable development. The choice to compare these two legal systems stems from the recurrent juxtaposition of the EU’s cooperation-based model with the U.S.’ sanction-based one. The doctoral project investigates the mutual supportiveness of these two different approaches and whether their combination can help in ensuring a more consistent enforcement.

Languages: Italian (native), Spanish (intermediate), French (elementary)

Bio: Csongor István Nagy is professor of law at the University of Szeged and research professor at the Center for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Research Network. He is a recurrent visiting professor at the Central European University (Budapest/New York/Vienna) and the Sapientia University of Transylvania (Romania), and an associate member at the Center for Private International Law at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. 

Csongor graduated at the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences (dr. jur.), where he also earned a Ph.D. He received master (LL.M.) and S.J.D. degrees from the Central European University and a D.Sc. degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He pursued graduate studies in Rotterdam, Heidelberg and Ithaca (New York) and had visiting appointments in the Hague, Munich, Brno, Hamburg, Edinburgh, London, Riga, Bloomington (Indiana), Brisbane, Beijing, Taipei and Rome. 

He has more than 260 publications in English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian and (in translation) in Croatian and Spanish. 

Research Focus: The purpose of Csongor Nagy’s research in Ann Arbor is to put the current European rule-of-law debate in the context of comparative federalism and to provide a normative analysis through the lens of US constitutional ideas. Benchmarking Europe’s idiosyncratic “federalism” should be an important facet of the social discourse on the “European project”, and comparative federalism could contribute significantly to the resolution of the EU’s current constitutional crisis. The path the EU is walking in the direction of an “ever closer Union” is far from unprecedented and, as far as multilevel constitutionalism is concerned, EU law may draw on the experiences of various regimes where centralized human rights protection and state constitutional identities coexist.

Languages: German (fluent), Hungarian (native), Romanian (fluent), French (working knowledge), Spanish (basic)

Bio: Since November 2021, Orlando has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for European Law, KU Leuven. He obtained his master’s degree in law from the University of Pisa and his LL.M. in European, Comparative and International Law from the European University Institute. He holds an Honors Degree and a PhD in Law from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. He was a visiting graduate student at the University of Toronto. After his PhD, Orlando was an Emile Noël Global fellow at NYU School of Law and a postdoctoral researcher at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. He is admitted to the Italian Bar and is author of Radical Constitutional Pluralism in Europe (Routledge, 2023).

Research Focus: At Michigan, Orlando will be working on the incorporation of federal rights and on the subsequent emergence of New Judicial Federalism in the United States. This study of the American system is part of a broader research project on the incorporation of rights and on the reaction at the level of the constituent units in federal and quasi-federal systems. Part of the broader ERC RESHUFFLE at the KU Leuven, the project aims at comparing the twofold dynamic of incorporation and subsequent contestation in the United States, Canada, and the European Union.

Languages: Italian (native), French (advanced).

Bio: Johannes Thierer is a PhD student at the Chair of Constitutional Law (Professor Johannes Masing) at the University of Freiburg (Germany) where he also worked as a research assistant from 2020 till 2023. He studied law at the University of Freiburg and the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and graduated in 2020. In his position as research assistant, he taught first and second semester students in constitutional law and European law. 

He currently works on his thesis about the European and American single market. His doctoral research is funded the German National Academic Foundation.

Johannes’ interests include European law, constitutional law and comparative law.

Research Focus: Johannes’ PhD-project explores constitutional constraints against economic regulation of single member states in federal systems. It compares the fundamental freedoms of the European Union with the dormant Commerce Clause of the American Constitution. Whereas the doctrines and tests of the European Court of Justice and the US Supreme Court seem strikingly similar at first glance, Johannes’ aim is to examine the different notions and concepts behind the norms. Building on this, the project intends to rethink the EU’s fundamental freedoms.

Languages: German (native), Swedish (intermediate), French (elementary)

Bio: Holding a Master’s Degree in Law magna cum laude, Justin started his career as a researcher at KULeuven (Belgium). After completing this first professional experience, he wanted to gain practical experience and help disadvantaged groups. Therefore, Justin worked as a legal counsel in an association helping young people. After this first practical experience, he undertook the bar traineeship. Justin was fully admitted to the bar after successfully passing the bar exam in 2016. While doing his bar traineeship, he also started working at UCLouvain (Belgium) in 2012. Justin has been lecturing various courses as a teaching assistant and, since 2020, as a lecturer. In 2021, he defended his Ph.D. thesis dealing with distressed sovereign debts. Justin will conduct postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan Law School as a B.A.E.F. Fellow.

Research Focus: In his Ph.D. thesis, Justin analyzed the regulation of the so-called “vulture funds” and proposed a new judicial approach in order to better address their speculation on sovereign debts. He wishes to expand the scope of his research findings and undertake a deeper comparative analysis during a one-year postdoctoral research stay at the University of Michigan Law School. The goal of this research project is to outline a legislative proposal concerned with profiteering in sovereign debts. Such a proposal appears to be of paramount importance given the boom in borrowing following the pandemic crisis.

Languages: French (native) and Dutch (proficient)

Bio: Eva-Maria Wettstein is a PhD student at the University of Cologne in Germany. She completed her state exam in law in 2022, which included a specialization on private international law, civil litigation, and economic law. Wettstein currently works as a trainee lawyer at Osborne Clarke’s Dispute and Risk Team in Cologne, where she is involved in an investor state arbitration proceeding. Additionally, she is a research fellow with the International Investment Law Centre Cologne (IILCC, University of Cologne). In this capacity, Wettstein contributes to research and teaching in international investment law, arbitration law and public international law. As speaker of the German doctoral researchers’ network for international investment law, Wettstein regularly organizes events and encourages interaction between practitioners and academics.

Research Focus: Wettstein’s research focuses on the enforcement of investor-state arbitration awards between European investors and European Union member states (“intra-EU arbitration awards”) in the USA. The heart of the research question – whether intra-EU arbitration awards are enforceable in the USA – lies in the relationship of public international law, EU law and US law. Against this background, the research project aims to explore the interaction between courts of both sovereign EU member states and the USA as well as the interaction between their laws from an international legal perspective.

Languages: German (native), French (intermediate), Portuguese (elementary)

Bio: Ms.Xiaodan ZHU is a Chinese professor specialized in International Tax Law. In this capacity, Xiaodan works at the Law School, Dalian Ocean University, where she also is the director of both Bachelor and Master Degree programs in Law. Prof. Zhu obtained a Ph.D. in International Tax Law from Xiamen University of China in 2013. She has been a Grotius Research Scholar of the University of Michigan Law School during 2015 and 2016. Her teaching activities include courses on international economic law, China’s tax law, and international tax law. Her wiritings (including journal articles and monographs) have appeared in many Chinese and English academic publications. Moreover, Professor Zhu is also a brilliant practical expert in tax law. She has been seconded to the Department of Tax Policy, Ministry of Finance of China in 2020, and she has been a part-time tax lawyer for almost six years in China.

Research Focus: Professor Zhu’s research is titled “ Interaction Between the OECD’s Global Minimum Tax Proposal and Tax Competition Rules: From the Perspective of China”, and the project addresses the following key issues: (1) What is the impact of OECD’s Global Minimum Tax 

Proposal (Pillar 2) on China’s tax competition rules and domestic tax law? (2)Is there any legal experience in US tax law relating to minimum income tax which is valuable for China? (3) How would China figure out the tax reforms conflict between international “Global Minimum Tax ” and domestic “Tax and Fee Reduction Policy”? 

Languages: Mandarin Chinese (native)

Bio: Niklas Burkart is a research assistant at the Institute for Public Law, Department of Constitutional Law at University of Freiburg. He currently works on his thesis about the conflict between Freedom of Art und Copyright. Burkart studied Law at Freiburg and Speyer. He was a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law. During his legal clerkship he worked at a law firm specialized in administrative law and at the German Federal Foreign Office, Department of Human Rights, in Berlin. Burkart coordinates the DFG (German Research Council) project “Handbook of Constitutional Law – German Constitutional Law from a Transnational Perspective”. In his position as research assistant, he teaches first and second semester students in constitutional law. 

Research Focus: Burkart’s PhD-project explores the relationship between Freedom of Art and Copyright from a fundamental law perspective. The thesis is driven by the idea of strengthening Art without threatening Copyright. This requires to reveal the parts of Copyright that are not based on Freedom of Property but on Personality Rights. Given the fact that German Copyright Law is regulated by European Law, the thesis has to address not only German but also European Fundamental Rights. To contrast the results, the conflict between Freedom of Art and Copyright shall also be examined under US Law. 

Languages: German (native), French (elementary)

Bio: Andrew Cecchinato is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School and the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He is PI of the Horizon 2020 project on John Selden’s Harmonic Jurisprudence. A European Interpretation of English Legal History. Previously, he was a postdoc in St Andrews, working on the ERC project Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. 

Andrew is book review editor for the American Journal of Legal History. He has received scholarships from the Max-Planck-Institute für europäische Rechtsgeschichte and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Robbins Collection in Civil and Religious Law, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Library of Congress. He studied law at the University of Trento, where his PhD on The Legal Education of Thomas Jefferson won the faculty prize. 

Research Focus: Andrew’s main research aims to repurpose the idea of Europe by studying how the seventeenth-century jurist, historian, and Hebraist John Selden harmonized the history of English law and the authority of the European legal tradition. His project will center on Selden’s effort to preserve and harmonize the history of English law within the inclusive order of nations recognized by a distinct reading of medieval and modern European jurisprudence. The research will thus focus on the cogent yet overlooked reasoning by which Selden proved that no law, however discrete, can rightfully be understood if isolated from the continuum of legal experience. 

Languages: English and Italian (native), French and German (elementary)

Bio:  Fabian is a PhD Candidate in public international law at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. His doctoral research is funded by a W.M. Tapp Studentship and the German National Academic Foundation. Previously, Fabian was a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, and read law in Hamburg (Dipl. Jur.) and Oxford (M.Jur.).

At the University of Cambridge, Fabian has supervised undergraduates and conducted workshops for Cambridge LL.M. students in International Investment Law and International Law as a Legal System. He is currently an Associate Editor at International Law in Domestic Courts (OUP) and an Assistant Editor for Investment Arbitration at Kluwer Arbitration Blog.

In recent years, Fabian has worked as a research assistant for Professor Campbell McLachlan, Professor Eyal Benvenisti and Sir Christopher Greenwood. In 2022, his article on informal communications to the ICJ was awarded the Rosalyn Higgins Prize of The Law & Practice of International Courts and Tribunals.  

Research Focus:  Fabian’s research interests lie in the areas of general international law, international dispute settlement, international investment law and German public law. His PhD project (“Self-Judgment in International Law”) investigates to what extent states can authoritatively auto-interpret international law. It traces the evolution of self-judgment throughout the history of international law, unearths links between self-judgment and the concept of obligation in international law, and assesses the approach of international courts and tribunals. Against this background, the project develops a theoretical and doctrinal framework to accommodate self-judgment in international law. 

Languages: German (native), French (proficient, C1), Spanish (advanced, B1/B2), Hindi (Basic), Italian (Basic)

Bio: Hijratullah Ekhtyar is an International & Comparative Law Research Scholar of the University of Michigan Law School. He served as a lecturer at the Nangarhar University Faculty of Law and Political Science since 2012 to 2021, and also was provincial director for the Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Services Commission of Afghanistan in Nangarhar province since 2018 to 2021. Ekhtyar also worked as a local coordinator and journalist for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in eastern provinces (Laghman, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Noristan) from 2011 to 2014. He served as a Lawyer and Provincial Commissioner for the Independent Electoral Compliant Commission (IECC) of Afghanistan in Nangarhar province from 2009 to 2011. Moreover, he served as an administrative clerk for the Economic Committee of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009. He also worked for Mediothek Afghanistan, a German based NGO as an in-charge of Academic and Cultural Affairs from 2007 to 2008.

He obtained LL.M degree in Sustainable International Development (SID) program from the University of Washington Law School in 2017, and completed his undergraduate studies in the Nangarhar University Faculty of Law and Political Science in 2008.

Ekhtyar participated in the University of Washington School of Law visiting scholar program in 2015, and attended the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the State Department of the United States in 2013.

Ekhtyar also run Ekhtyar Legal Services (ELS), a non-profit legal assistance provider organization in Nangarhar province from 2009 to 2015. He was a certified defense lawyer under the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association during 2009-2015.

After completion of his graduate studies in the University of Washington Law School, he served as a Legal Research Intern in the Library of Congress in 2017.

During his tenure with IWPR, Ekhtyar wrote about 30 articles for www.iwpr.net. He also published an article about combating corruption in Afghanistan in https://nsuworks.nova.edu/ilsajournal/vol24/iss1/4/ and https://www.ijlsr.in/ijlsr_special_issue_june_2018. Furthermore, he wrote/ translated more than 20 books and numerous articles that are published in national language, Pashto.

Ekhtyar received a Medal of Excellence from Zhwand Group of Companies and Green Motion for his writings in 2014. 

Research Focus: Ekhtyar’s research focus is on International Law of Armed Conflicts, Good Governance, Corruption, and Constitutional Law. He recently completed his research project on the Hiring Process of lecturers in Afghanistan universities. He is currently working on another research project focusing on Constitutionalism in Afghanistan. The main theme of his research is how to adopt a comprehensive constitution for Afghanistan to end up the long-lasting crises and war in that country.

Languages: Pashto and Dari (native), English (excellent), and Urdu (elementary).

Bio: Giulia Giusy Cusenza is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law at the University of Udine in Italy, where she is also an adjunct professor of administrative law at the Engineering Faculty. She earned her Ph.D. in administrative law from the University of Trento in 2020, and in 2018 she obtained an Intensive International Master of Laws (I.I.LL.M.) held by the European Public Law Organization in Athens. In recent years she has been lecturing various courses as a teaching assistant and as a lecturer. Moreover, she became a lawyer in 2018, and she was awarded the title of lawyer specialized in administrative law in June 2022 by the Italian National Bar Council.

Research Focus: Giulia’s research investigates the implications of the digitalization process and the application of artificial intelligence on public administrations and judicial activities. She is conducting comparative research on assessment procedures for developing algorithmic systems within the public administration. Her current project aims at studying the benefits of prioritizing stakeholders’ welfare in algorithm design for public administrations by implementing democratic and participatory processes. Her research interests revolve around administrative law and comparative administrative law.

Languages: Italian (native)

Bio: Maria Haag is a lecturer of European law at Tilburg University Law School (Netherlands). She holds an LL.B. from Durham University (United Kingdom), and an LL.M. from the European University Institute (Italy). She defended her PhD thesis “A Sense of Responsibility: The Shifting Roles of the Member States for the Union Citizen” at the European University Institute in October 2019. She has previously worked as a trainee at the Legal Service of the European Commission and a research assistant at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advance Studies (Italy). From August to December 2016, Maria visited Michigan Law School for the first time as a Grotius Research Scholar. She is an editor for the European Law Blog and an external editor for the European Journal of Legal Studies. Her teaching activities include undergraduate and postgraduate courses on EU constitutional law, internal market and free movement law, judicial protection, and migration law.

Research Focus: Maria previously developed the concept of responsibility as a prism to re-evaluate the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and to differentiate between the roles that the home and the host Member States play for EU citizens. Building on this, she now wishes to examine further aspects of the concept of responsibility: the responsibilities of citizens in EU law, on the one hand, and the responsibility of the Union as whole for its citizens, on the other.

Languages: German (native), French, Dutch

Bio: Lucas Hartmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Legal Theory at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Prior to that, he conducted research at the Institute for German and European Administrative Law at the University of Heidelberg. Lucas’ research interests focus on legal theory, on comparative law studies, and on European Union Law.

Lucas defended his PhD entitled “The Codification of EU Administrative Law” (“Die Kodifikation des Europäischen Verwaltungsrechts”) at the University of Heidelberg in 2019. He was also a visiting researcher at Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) in 2021 and was awarded a three-year full-time Senior Researcher Fellowship (“Eigene Stelle”) from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) in 2020. 

Research Focus: At Michigan, Lucas will focus on his comparative research project on judicial lawmaking. The aim of this research project is to compare German concepts of dynamic interpretation with similar understandings concerning the role of judicial lawmaking in the USA, France, and the EU that allow or forbid courts to develop the constitution, statutes, or “the law” in general. In particular, he intends to learn about the American practice and literature on constitutional and statutory construction, common law reasoning, and judicial activism/restraint.

Languages: German, English and French

Bio: Moshe Jaffe is a JSD candidate at Bar Ilan University, and an LLM Graduate from Columbia Law School. Jaffe is a constitutional law Adjunct Professor at the Academic Center of Law and Science in Israel, and an Adjunct Professor at Cardozo School of Law. As an Israeli lawyer, Jaffe represented dozens of cases before the Israeli Supreme Court with emphasis on Religion and State, Human Rights, and National Security. Simultaneously, Jaffe serves as a legal advisor for the Counter-Terrorism section in the IDF’s Department of the Legal Advisor to Judea and Samaria. Jaffe also serves as an administrative judge on the Confiscation of Funds Committee of the Money Laundering Headquarters tribunal.

Research Focus: Jaffe’s research comparatively addresses the constitutionality and the use of proportionality tests in judicial review of tax legislation. The research focuses on three different judicial systems — Israel, the U.S, and Jewish Law. Alongside the main issue, the research addresses the questions of tax definitions and equality in tax law. The research’s main argument is that the Israeli proportionality doctrine is the most effective and correct instrument for applying judicial review to tax legislation. This stands in contrast to the use of the scrutiny doctrine, which struggles to adapt itself to the flexibility and balances that tax laws require.

Languages: Hebrew – native, Spanish – proficient, France – elementary.

Bio: Shajan Kreuter is a PhD student at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He studied law at the University of Frankfurt and spent his clerkship at the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt. 

Shajan Kreuter is admitted to the bar and works at Sullivan Cromwell LLP in Frankfurt.

Research Focus: In his PhD thesis Kreuter portrays the regulation of crypto assets in Germany, the EU and the US. The thesis examines the current regulation of crypto assets in Germany and the EU and analyses the digital finance package of the European Commission which contains three draft legislations constituting the first comprehensive regulation of crypto assets in the EU. Furthermore, the thesis describes the current regulatory landscape and developments in the US and compares the EU draft legislation with the US regulatory regime.

Languages: German (native), French (proficient)

Bio: Linda Meister is a PhD student at the Department for Private International Law, International Civil Litigation and Comparative Law at the Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen in Germany. After her state exam in 2020 which included a specialization on Private International Law, International Civil Litigation and Comparative Law, she started working as a Research, Teaching and Grading Assistant at the University of Tuebingen. In this capacity she has taught courses in Public Law, Private Law and Private International Law. During her undergraduate and doctoral studies, she also participated successfully in the certificate programs “Law, Ethics, Economics” and “Human Rights Law in Practice”.

Her interests include Principles of Private International Law, International Civil Litigation, Comparative Law and Human Rights Law.

Research Focus: Linda’s research focuses on the principle of neutrality in Private International Law. This area of law determines which country’s law is applicable in a case with connections to multiple countries. The classical European approach aims to treat all legal systems equally and abstracts the question of applicable law from the content of the different laws. This abstraction is called the principle of neutrality. However, this principle is being challenged. Developments in Europe and especially teachings in the US focus on a just outcome rather than a neutral decision. Linda tries to substantiate the principle of neutrality and assess deviating developments.

Languages: German (native), French (intermediate), Spanish (intermediate), Turkish (elementary)

Bio: Zhiruo Ni is a PhD candidate in the College of Comparative Law, China University of Political Science and Law, in Beijing. Prior to her PhD studies, she received a Master of Laws at King’s College London and a Bachelor of Laws at the University of International Business and Economics in China. In 2017 she was a Visiting Student at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv (Israel). From 2016 to 2018, she held legal internships in the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC) and JunHe LLP, China. Her research interests mainly include Antitrust Law and Comparative Law.

Research Focus: Ni’s research focuses on antitrust regulation toward vertical integration. She has found that antitrust law is getting primary attention in China, but there is still a lack of Law & Economics studies and relevant cases, due to a long-term regulatory and judicial oversight before the information age. As vertical integration has been a dominant characteristic of some major 

industries in the U.S., she hopes to build a comparative antitrust study on the issue between both jurisdictions, where the digital platforms could be the most suitable legal subjects for antitrust analysis at present.

Languages: Chinese (native)

Bio: Saba Pipia holds a Ph.D. degree in Law from Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia). He taught international law at several universities in Tbilisi, Georgia. Throughout his doctoral and post-doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at Michigan State University (USA), The Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Germany); The University of Groningen (The Netherlands); Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece); Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law (Germany), Peace Palace Library (The Netherlands) and Jerusalem Institute of Justice (Israel). He was an invited lecturer at the University of Porto (Portugal) and the University of Iasi (Romania). He is a recipient of multiple research scholarships including from the Georgian National Scientific Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), European Commission (Erasmus program), and the US State Department (Fulbright Visiting Scholars program). Areas of his research include international humanitarian law, international criminal law, global animal law, and international environmental law. He has published academic publications in Georgia and abroad.

Research Focus: Saba’s research project is about missing persons. He intends to study the issue of missing persons from all possible international legal angles and provide an analysis, which will be useful for various target groups, including academics, students, governments, and armed forces. Saba thinks that there is a need to develop the concept of ‘international law of missing persons’ and examine this multi-dimensional issue through the lens of various international law instruments to determine the body of law, that regulates the issue of missing persons, and which can be 

applied whenever there is a need to deal with missing persons. The most important goal of this research visit is to promote legal scholarship in the emerging field of international law – missing persons law – and eventually to produce an academic publication on this topic.

Languages: Georgian (native), Russian (limited working proficiency), Hebrew (elementary proficiency)

Bio: Dr. Elena Pribytkova is a Lecturer in Law at Southampton Law School. She received a Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.) degree from Columbia Law School and is a Habilitation candidate at the Faculty of Law of the University of Basel. She held various research and teaching appointments at leading universities and research institutes all over the world, including Columbia Law School, New York University School of Law, University of Oxford, European University Institute, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg University, Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, University of Basel, Radboud University Nijmegen, and National University of Singapore. She has more than fifty publications, including publications in top U.S. law reviews and internationally recognized peer-reviewed law journals, such as the Chicago Journal of International Law, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, RphZ – Rechtsphilosophie – Zeitschrift für Grundlagen des Rechts, and N.Y.U. Journal of International Law & Politics.

Research Focus: Elena has worked extensively on individual and collective multidisciplinary research projects on theories of justice, human dignity, law and morality, governance, and human rights, in particular, socio-economic rights and their role in reducing poverty and inequality as well as in promoting social, global, and environmental justice, and sustainable development. Her current project Towards a World of Accountability: Extraterritorial Obligations in the Area of Socio-Economic Rights from Philosophical, Legal and Practical Perspectives pays special attention to human rights obligations of non-state actors. Her Habilitation monograph A Decent Social Minimum in the Language of Human Rights focuses on mechanisms for ensuring the social minimum guarantees in international, regional, and national orders.

Languages: Russian (native speaker); English & German (fluent); French (intermediate); Slavic languages & Swiss German (basic knowledge)

Bio: Sabrina Ragone (PhD) teaches comparative law at the University of Bologna’s Department of Political and Social Sciences, where she holds the post of Head of International Relations. She is also a member of the scientific committee of the Buenos Aires Campus and the excellence college of the University. She is Senior Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), where she pursued her research between 2015 and 2017. Previously, she was a García Pelayo Fellow at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales – Madrid (2012-2015) and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (2011-2012). She has taught comparative law in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina. 

She has collaborated with several competitive national research projects funded by the Italian and Spanish ministries of education as well as by research institutes in Latin America. Between 2018 and 2021 she was the PI of the Jean Monnet Module CRISES “Critical Risks for Integration and Solidarity in the European Space”, Erasmus+ Program. See: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/sabrina.ragone2/cv-en 

Research Focus: Sabrina Ragone’s research comparatively addresses constitutional adjudication, territorial organization, and the interaction between international and domestic laws. She deals with Latin American constitutionalism from a comparative perspective, taking into account its transnational dimension. Her book on constitutional adjudication on constitutional amendments was the first comprehensive assessment of the issue (“I controlli giurisdizionali sulle revisioni costituzionali” 2011 in Italian, 2012 in Spanish). She then focused on the core constitutional issues of European integration, publishing several pieces on the issue, among them, the edited book “Managing the Euro Crisis. National EU policy coordination in the debtor countries”, Routledge 2018, and the volume “Parlamentarismos y crisis económica: afectación de los encajes constitucionales en Italia y España”, Bosch, 2020.

Languages: Italian (native); Spanish (proficient); German (good); French (intermediate); Portuguese (working knowledge); Catalan (working knowledge) 

Bio: Lea Schneider is a PhD student at the Institute for International Law and Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Zurich, where she taught courses and co-organized the 22nd Conference of Young Research Scholars in Public Law (Junge Tagung Öffentliches Recht) and co-edited the annual anthology for young legal researchers of the University of Zurich (APARIUZ). Prior to pursuing her PhD studies, she received an LL.M. in Transnational Law from King’s College London and a Master of Laws from the University of Zurich. Her interests include public international law, public law, international economic law, transnational law and human rights law.

Research Focus: Lea Schneider’s research centers on the regulatory landscape of transnational corporations (TNCs) regarding human rights and environmental standards. In her PhD thesis she analyses what insights are gained from a transnational perspective on the regulatory landscape of TNCs. Schneider conceptualizes transnational law, along the lines of Peer Zumbansen, as a methodology. In her thesis, she claims, for example, that a transnational perspective allows us to gain an enhanced understanding of the role and functioning of international soft law-initiatives in this regulatory area.

Languages: German (native), French (proficient), Italian (elementary)

Bio: Francesco Tumbiolo is a Ph.D. student in Legal Sciences at the University of Milan-Bicocca. He was awarded a doctoral scholarship for his research project about cryptocurrencies’ taxation. Francesco is also a teaching assistant at the University of Insubria (Como), where he graduated in law. He was admitted, ranking among the top five students, to the School of Specialization in Legal Professions of the University of Milan. After getting the specialization diploma, he passed the bar exam, and he is currently an attorney-at-law in Italy at a renowned tax law firm with branches in Rome and Milan.

Research Focus: Francesco’s research focuses on cryptocurrencies’ taxation, especially from the Italian tax law point of view. However, he is now interested in giving his doctoral thesis a comparative perspective: his aim is to find what are the solutions adopted by different OECD members, like the US, to fix the same problems every country faces in taxing cryptocurrencies. Since they are in rapid development, he agrees that policymakers have to progress in considering cryptocurrencies’ tax implications in order to find a shared best practice.

Languages: Italian (native)

Bio: Holding a Master’s Degree in Law magna cum laude, Justin started his career as a researcher at KULeuven (Belgium). After completing this first professional experience, he wanted to gain practical experience and help disadvantaged groups. Therefore, Justin worked as a legal counsel in an association helping young people. After this first practical experience, he undertook the bar traineeship. Justin was fully admitted to the bar after successfully passing the bar exam in 2016. While doing his bar traineeship, he also started working at UCLouvain (Belgium) in 2012. Justin has been lecturing various courses as a teaching assistant and, since 2020, as a lecturer. In 2021, he defended his Ph.D. thesis dealing with distressed sovereign debts. Justin will conduct postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan Law School as a B.A.E.F. Fellow.

Research Focus: In his Ph.D. thesis, Justin analyzed the regulation of the so-called “vulture funds” and proposed a new judicial approach in order to better address their speculation on sovereign debts. He wishes to expand the scope of his research findings and undertake a deeper comparative analysis during a one-year postdoctoral research stay at the University of Michigan Law School. The goal of this research project is to outline a legislative proposal concerned with profiteering in sovereign debts. Such a proposal appears to be of paramount importance given the boom in borrowing following the pandemic crisis.

Languages: French (native) and Dutch (proficient)

Bio: Wu Weiding is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Law of Renmin University of China (RUC). His areas of interest include corporate and securities law and arbitration law. He received his Bachelor of Laws degree and Juris Master degree respectively from China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) and Peking University (PKU). Wu has participated in several research programs, such as “Research on Major Problems of Bankruptcy of Listed Companies” and “Improvement of Governance Mechanism of Listed Companies”. He has worked as an intern in Beijing JunZeJun (Changsha) Law Firm, Beijing Tiantong Law Firm and the People’s Court of Changping District. Currently, he is an editor of Renming University Law Review. Wu has also already published a number of academic papers in core journals of China.

Research Focus: Wu has been focusing on social enterprises in the form of companies in China. Social enterprises are the types of enterprises pursuing both profits and public welfare. In China, there are a large number of social enterprises taking the form of companies. The core problem is that in China, the company is an organizational form purely pursuing profit-making goals, and Company Law of the People’s Republic of China does not provide any strong institutional guarantee for social enterprises to achieve social goals. Questions to be addressed in Wu’s research are as follows: Why do an increasing number of social enterprises exist in the form of companies in China? How can these social enterprises achieve their social goals without “mission drift”?

Languages: Chinese (native) and German (elementary)

Bio: Ms.Xiaodan Zhu is a Chinese professor specialized in International Tax Law. In this capacity, Xiaodan works at the Law School, Dalian Ocean University, where she also is the director of both Bachelor and Master Degree programs in Law. Prof. Zhu obtained a Ph.D. in International Tax Law from Xiamen University of China in 2013. She has been a Grotius Research Scholar of the University of Michigan Law School during 2015 and 2016. Her teaching activities include courses on international economic law, China’s tax law, and international tax law. Her writings (including journal articles and monographs) have appeared in many Chinese and English academic publications. Moreover, Professor Zhu is also a brilliant practical expert in tax law. She has been seconded to the Department of Tax Policy, Ministry of Finance of China in 2020, and she has been a part-time tax lawyer for almost six years in China.

Research Focus: Professor Zhu’s research is titled “ Interaction Between the OECD’s Global Minimum Tax Proposal and Tax Competition Rules: From the Perspective of China”, and the project addresses the following key issues: (1) What is the impact of OECD’s Global Minimum Tax 

Proposal (Pillar 2) on China’s tax competition rules and domestic tax law? (2)Is there any legal experience in US tax law relating to minimum income tax which is valuable for China? (3) How would China figure out the tax reforms conflict between international “Global Minimum Tax ” and domestic “Tax and Fee Reduction Policy”? 

Languages: Mandarin Chinese (native)

Bio: Zhiyu Li is an Assistant Professor in Law and Policy at Durham Law School and a Fellow at the Durham Research Methods Centre. She holds undergraduate degrees in law and economics from the East China University of Political Science and Law and a J.S.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Zhiyu’s research investigates issues that lie at the intersection of law and policy, with a particular emphasis on the role of courts in democratic and authoritarian regimes. The findings of her research have been published in or accepted by U.S. and international journals, including the Harvard International Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, and the Cornell International Law Journal, and presented at various fora, such as the Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum and the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Comparative Law.

Research Focus: Zhiyu’s current research asks whether the rejection of the separation of powers principle in socialist jurisdictions makes it easier for courts to take on extrajudicial functions and exercise influence in ways that are salutary but forbidden to their liberal democratic cousins.

At Michigan, she will work on a joint project that aims to study cognitive biases of legal professionals and lay persons through survey experiments fielded on judges and university students. The project findings are expected to have normative implications for institutional choices in the civil and criminal justice system. She will also further her work on specialized judicial empowerment.

Languages: Mandarin Chinese (native)

Bio: Sarah Zimmermann is a PhD student at the Max-Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) where she also works at the European and Comparative Legal History department.

Zimmermann studied Law and European Studies in Mainz (Germany), Maastricht (Netherlands) and Dijon (France). Prior to pursuing her PhD, she obtained the German State Exams and a Masters (Maîtrise en Droit) from the University of Dijon with a focus on European economic law. She also holds a joint LL.M in international private law and European Law from the universities of Mainz and Dijon. She has received various scholarships during her studies and for her PhD research. During her legal clerkship she worked at the Frankfurt office of WilmerHale obtaining professional experience in the field of regulatory affairs and European Law.

Her interests include European law, procedural law, comparative law and administrative law.

Research Focus: Zimmermann’s PhD research focuses on the procedural law of the Courts of the European Union. It looks at the emergence of these rules in the 1950s from a historical and comparative legal perspective. She is evaluating to which extent the ECJ procedural rules during that time were comparable to the national procedural rules of the member states and to those of international courts. She is using sources from the archives of the European institutions and the relevant ministries of the founding states and seeks to give insight into one of the first decision making processes of the Community.

Languages: German (native), French (proficient), Dutch (elementary)

Bio: Alain is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the School of Law, University of Glasgow (UK). Alain holds graduate degrees in Philosophy (MSc, London School of Economics), History (MA, Graduate Institute) and Law (LL.M., Toronto). He was awarded his doctoral degree at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. His doctoral dissertation was published as a monograph with Routledge (The ECHR and Human Rights Theory). Alain subsequently obtained three post-doctoral fellowships funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European University Institute in Florence (Max Weber Fellowship) and the University of Oslo (PluriCourts Centre of Excellence).

Research Focus: Alain’s research aims to reconstruct and evaluate the practices of constitutional law, human rights law and international law from the perspective of normative theory. In particular, Alain has examined the practice of the European Court of Human Rights, UN treaty bodies and the International Criminal Court. His research has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals such as International Journal of Constitutional Law (2019, 2022), Global Constitutionalism (2016, 2021, 2022), Ratio Juris (2019), Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2019, 2021), Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence (2016) and Criminal Law and Philosophy (2018), among others. Alain is also currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (PluriCourts Center for Excellence) for a two-year project (2021-23) studying the nexus between theories of populism and the practice of the European Court of Human Rights. His monograph on the topic is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Languages: English, French, German, Spanish

Andrew Cecchinato is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School and the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He is PI of the Horizon 2020 project on John Selden’s Harmonic Jurisprudence. A European Interpretation of English Legal History. Previously, he was a postdoc in St Andrews, working on the ERC project Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. 

Andrew is a book review editor for the American Journal of Legal History. He has received scholarships from the Max-Planck-Institute für europäische Rechtsgeschichte and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Robbins Collection in Civil and Religious Law, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Library of Congress. He studied law at the University of Trento, where his Ph.D. on The Legal Education of Thomas Jefferson won the faculty prize. 

Research Focus

Andrew’s main research aims to repurpose the idea of Europe by studying how the seventeenth-century jurist, historian, and Hebraist John Selden harmonized the history of English law and the authority of the European legal tradition. His project will center on Selden’s effort to preserve and harmonize the history of English law within the inclusive order of nations recognized by a distinct reading of medieval and modern European jurisprudence. The research will thus focus on the cogent yet overlooked reasoning by which Selden proved that no law, however discrete, can rightfully be understood if isolated from the continuum of legal experience. 

Languages

English and Italian (native), French and German (elementary)

Apostolos Chronopoulos is Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London.

Apostolos has studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He continued his studies at Queen Mary University of London (LLM Lond.) and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich (LLM Eur. and Dr. Jur.). During his Ph.D. studies, he was supported by a scholarship from the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition, and Tax Law (now MPI for Innovation and Competition). At the postdoctoral level, he has received scholarships that allowed him to conduct research as a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School and as an invited overseas researcher at the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo, Japan.

Research Focus

His research interests span the broader field of intellectual property and competition law. Currently, his focus is on US and EU trademark law, unfair competition law, patent law, economic analysis of intellectual property law, comparative intellectual property law, the relationship of intellectual property law and general private law, the interface between Intellectual property and antitrust law.

His latest publications include: Exceptions to Trade Mark Exhaustion: Inalienability Rules for the Protection of Reputational Economic Value [2021] 43(6) European Intellectual Property Review 352-365; Reconstructing the Complete Patent Bargain: The Doctrine of Equivalents, [2020] Intellectual Property Quarterly, Issue 2, 138-160; Strict Liability and Negligence in Copyright Law: Fair Use as Regulation of Activity Levels, 97 Nebraska Law Review 384-468 (2018).

Languages

English, German, Greek

Viviana Galletto Farro graduated from the Catholic University of Uruguay with a Juris Doctor degree. She has been a professional judge in Uruguay since 2014, and she is currently nominated by the Supreme Court of Justice of this country for an upcoming promotion. She has attended on a wide range of cases in both civil and criminal law matters, gaining experience as a judge.

She is a contract law specialist and holds an LL.M degree in Contract Law. In addition, she is pursuing an LL.M degree in Criminal Procedure Law, while she currently works on her Ph.D. thesis in Legal and Research Sciences from the Catholic University of Argentine.

She is a graduate teaching assistant in civil and procedural law at the Catholic University of Uruguay. Her writings have been published in numerous legal publications. She has received multiple scholarships and awards, including the Fulbright Scholar grant to study at the University of Michigan Law School as a research scholar.

Research Focus

The purpose of the research will be to identify the relevant legal standards for the admission, evaluation and sufficiency of the evidence presented by the parties in the intermediate stage of the criminal process, in order to discover the truth and achieve effective, fast and fair solutions.

The main focus will be to analyze the objective parameters that constitute the rules of evidence by which judges issue their rulings, so these criteria could be used as a framework in the Uruguayan Criminal Procedure System during the intermediate stage of trials.

Languages

Spanish (native), Italian (elementary). 

Jaka Kukavica is a Ph.D. Researcher at European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His Ph.D. project comparatively examines consensus analysis as an interpretative method in various multilevel polities. He is also working as a researcher on “The Court of Justice in the Archives” project at the Academy of European Law and the “Judicial Networks between Supreme Courts in Europe” project led by Prof. Mathias Siems. Before commencing his doctoral project, Kukavica studied law at Ljubljana and Cambridge. He is the Head of Section for European Law at the European Journal of Legal Studies and he served as an Editor of the Cambridge International Law Journal in the past. He has received multiple scholarships and awards, including the Mary Higgins Scholarship and the Lilian Knowles Prize awarded by Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Research Focus

Kukavica’s doctoral research examines the relationship between the structure of multilevel polities and the types of consensus analysis courts use when interpreting legal norms. Kukavica argues that different types of consensus analysis imply different understandings of the value of state autonomy. On these grounds, he examines whether courts use consensus analysis in a way that fits the structure of the multilevel system in which they operate. In particular, he focuses on the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Justice of the EU, the European Court of Human Rights, and the UN Human Rights Committee.

Languages

Slovenian (native), Serbo-Croatian, and Italian (proficient)

Caroline Maciel is a doctoral researcher in open data of the Quality of Law Research Clinic, which is a member of the International Association of Legislation. She works as Regulatory Affairs and Government Relations at Stone Co (financial and software solutions) and is interested in Big Techs entrance in financial markets and how regulation should approach this matter. She studied Law at UFMG (Brazil) and University of Leeds (UK) and won two of the university’s prizes (best in civil and procedure law). Her master degree Institutions and Public Policies (Arraes: 2019) won two awards. She was a Research Fellow at AI Labs in a project on artificial intelligence to understand Congress. Her teaching and academic activities include courses on law and technology, constitutional law, administrative law and legal theory. Her writings have been published in numerous peer-reviewed publications, some in english.

Research Focus

Caroline’s research addresses how technology, such as machine learning-based systems, can be used to improve regulatory and legislative risk management. She argues that Brazil has substantial unequal access to public data and political players. Given this, tools to automatically process, analyze and categorize data, identify trends and predict best courses of legal action could change how advocacy is done, reducing this asymmetry. She analyzes some of these situations in financial market, as Big Tech’s started to provide payment services in Brazil. She chose to collect improvements from the US private and public sector because it is one of the front-runners in AI and algorithmic transparency, which can be used in Regulatory Impact Assessment Brazilian models. She evaluates how to decipher the government’s decision-making process patterns (without losing the political aspect) and the possible benefits to the democratic and economic development. 

Languages

Portuguese (native), English (proficient) and Spanish (intermediate)

Veena Manikulam is a PhD student at the Institute for International Law and Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Research and Teaching Assistant at the University of Zurich, where she taught several courses and co-authored three articles in the area of international economic law. Prior to pursuing her PhD studies, she received an LL.M. in Transnational Law from King’s College London and a Master of Laws from the University of Zurich. In 2016, she was an exchange student at the National Law School of India University. Her interests include international economic law, transnational law and human rights law.

Research Focus

Veena Manikulam’s research centres on the reform of international investment law. In her PhD thesis she addresses to what extent the concept of investor accountability has been incorporated in investment law. Based on the insufficient adoption of investor accountability in existing investment agreements, her research focuses on the question how mechanisms to enforce substantive standards (including human rights, labour and environmental standards) could be designed to adequately incorporate the notion of investor accountability in investment law. Manikulam argues that a transnational approach to this question presents the chance to propose innovative enforcement mechanisms.

Languages

German (native), Malayalam (native), French (proficient), Hindi (limited working proficiency), Arabic (limited working proficiency)

Marcin Menkes is an Associate Professor at Warsaw School of Economics, in the Department of Business Law, where he also heads the Post-Graduate Studies of Law and Economics of the Capital Market. He is a member of the International Law Association Committee on the Rule of Law in International Investment Law and the Investor-States Dispute Settlement Academic Forum. He has held visiting fellowships at top universities including Cornell University, Cambridge University, Università di Torino, Università degli Studi di Firenze, and Università di Bologna.

His research interests include international investment arbitration, international monetary and financial matters, sovereign debt restructuring, sovereign immunities, and economic sanctions. He has published four books, over 100 scientific articles, and more than 1,000 blog posts, newspaper articles, etc.

Besides his academic work, he is also Of Counsel in Queirtius, an international litigation and arbitration law firm.

Research Focus

Menkes’s recent piecemeal projects are part of a larger research agenda on the evolution of public international law. His overarching hypothesis is that current diagnoses of the Westaphalian international order crisis are superficial and address only symptoms, not the roots of change.

While at Michigan Law School, he will examine the extent to which blockchain carries the potential to go beyond what has been debated and analyzed so far: to undermine the legal personality of states, to recognize the personality of MNEs, to open up the catalog of sources of law, and, ultimately, to undermine the foundations of the entire system.

Languages

Polish (native), French (proficient), Italian (proficient), Spanish (Intermediary), Dutch (elementary)

Zarina Mussakhojayeva is a lawyer specializing in international trade law and compliance, focusing particularly on regulatory compliance, international sanctions, and anti-bribery regulations. Zarina has worked for multinational companies, advising on corporate compliance and governance issues in the areas of Antitrust, U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, U.K. Bribery Act, Antiboycott and economic sanctions. Zarina is an experienced lawyer qualified to practice law in Kazakhstan with professional experience covering matters related to mining operations, corporate finance, and mergers and acquisitions in the oil and gas industry.

Zarina received her B.A. in law from Kazakh Humanitarian Law University in 2006, where she received the University President’s Scholarship award. In 2008 she obtained her LL.M. degree at Duke University School of Law. Zarina was awarded a prestigious Kazakhstan Government-sponsored International Scholarship to pursue her studies at Duke. Zarina studied at American University in Washington, D.C. and Minnesota State University as an exchange student under the U.S. Department of State “Freedom Support Act” Fellowship Program.

Research Focus

Zarina’s research focuses on regulatory and legal aspects of implementing global compliance practices in Russia and Kazakhstan. The research is intended to identify regulatory compliance challenges faced by multinational corporations operating in the region. It is aimed at analyzing applicable regulatory environment in these post-Soviet countries, understanding available compliance function and established practices, and investigating recent FCPA enforcement actions. The research identifies the OFAC-imposed economic sanctions and Russian countersanctions and conflict between Russian antimonopoly legislation and U.S. anti-boycott regulations as key areas for further examination. In addition, some of the essential legal concepts are proposed to overcome the identified challenges.

Languages

Kazakh (native), Russian (native), and English (fluent)

Azusa Ogasawara has been a public prosecutor in Japan for six years. She graduated from Kyoto University Law School with a Juris Doctor degree. She has worked on a wide range of cases in both the investigation and trial departments, gaining experience as a practicing lawyer. She was recommended by the Public Prosecutors Office in Japan and is currently studying at the University of Michigan Law School as a research scholar.

Research Focus

Azusa’s research investigates legislative and operational issues related to laws against money laundering. In recent years, Japan has seen an increase in the amount of money laundering cases. However, the reaction of Japan to these crimes has not been fulfilling due to the lack of our experience in this field; thus, Japan must consider further strengthening its regulations while referring to the efforts of other countries. She chose these issues, because she believed that studying in the U.S., where research in this field is more advanced, would provide meaningful results for Japanese criminal justice.

Languages

Japanese (native)

Aparna Singh is a lawyer licensed to practice in India. She holds law degrees from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) and the University of Delhi (India).

After graduating from Cambridge with an LL.M. degree in International Law, she joined Fietta LLP (London). At Fietta LLP, she assisted in ongoing investor-state arbitrations and even worked on several maritime law issues including, but not limited to, extent of the territorial waters of archipelagic states.

Prior to pursuing the LL.M. program, Aparna practiced law in India for four years. As a Senior Associate at a premier law firm, she represented private parties and government authorities in cases covering diverse areas of law, ranging from government regulation to cross-border transactions. Aparna also had the opportunity to work on several international arbitrations and received favorable awards for the firm’s clients.

Before coming to the University of Michigan Law School, Aparna practiced as an Arbitration Consultant in India, advising clients on international and domestic arbitration issues. 

Research Focus

Aparna’s current research includes a comparative analysis of regulatory regimes adopted in developed and developing countries to promote cross-border transactions and foreign direct investment. She intends to expand the scope of this research by looking at regulatory practices adopted by the U.S. and how India’s recent reforms stand in comparison. In light of India’s recent termination of many of its Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs), this research will also encompass India’s dispute resolution system, both within and without the new Model BIT, and how it can be improved to meet the challenges ahead.

Languages

Hindi (native), Spanish (basic/learning)

John Trajer is a doctoral researcher in law at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Over the course of his PhD, he has been a visiting fellow at the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and at the Dickson Poon School of Law (King’s College London). Prior to commencing his doctoral degree, he obtained a BA from the University of Oxford, a Joint MA from the universities of Göttingen and Groningen, and an LLM from the European University Institute. He has acquired professional experience in the field of migration and refugee law at a range of NGOs and international organizations, including the AIRE Centre (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe), the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, and the Council of Europe.

Research Focus

John’s doctoral research explores the scope of states’ protective duties towards trafficked

persons under international and regional European law. Specifically, it examines the conditions under which host states are obliged to ensure access to rehabilitative assistance for trafficked migrants, focusing on points of intersection between anti-trafficking, human rights, and refugee law. Beyond his PhD project, John is interested generally in the fields of migration, criminal, and international human rights law. At the European University Institute, he is one of the coordinators of the Migration Working Group (Migration Policy Centre) and an active participant of the Human and Fundamental Rights Working Group (Law Department). He is also a member of the Human Trafficking Research Network based at Queen’s University Belfast.

Languages

John is proficient in Hungarian and Italian, while he speaks Dutch and German at an upper-intermediate level.

I am Professor of International Law and Co-Director of PluriCourts – Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order, University of Oslo, Norway. I have been Director of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo. I was Co-chair of the International Law Association’s Study Group on the ‘Content and Evolution of the Rules of Interpretation’ and am Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law, Luxembourg. I have been a member of the Executive Board of the European Society of International Law.

Research Focus

I will give a special course as part of the 2022 Hague Academy Winter Course on ‘Deference by International Courts and Tribunals to National Organs’. I have committed to write a book on the basis of the lectures, to be published in the Academy’s Collected Courses. I am looking forward to writing the book in the research environment provided by the University of Michigan.

Languages

English (some German and French)

Thomas Verellen is Assistant Professor in European Union and International Law at Utrecht University (Netherlands) and a Research Fellow at the Institute for European Law, KU Leuven (Belgium). Thomas is an expert in EU and comparative foreign relations law and has a particular interest in the impact of geopolitical change on the governance of EU trade and investment policy. 

Thomas defended his PhD entitled ‘EU Foreign Relations Federalism. A Comparison with the United States, Canada and Belgium’ at KU Leuven in September 2019. From 2018 to 2020, Thomas practiced EU and international trade law at the Brussels office of Bird & Bird LLP. Thomas has held visiting positions at the University of Michigan Law School (2016-2017) and the Université de Montréal (2015) and was a trainee in the chambers of Professor Koen Lenaerts, President of the Court of Justice of the EU (2015).

Research Focus

At Michigan, Thomas will start a comparative research project on legal and political accountability mechanisms in EU and U.S. trade and investment policy, and he will work on the book version of his PhD, which will be published in 2022 as part of Oxford University Press’ Comparative Constitutionalism series. In addition, Thomas will teach European Union Law at Michigan during the 2022 Winter Term.

Languages

Dutch, French and English

Dr. Eddie Wei is an International and Comparative Law Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School under the mentorship of Professors Catharine MacKinnon and Kimberly Thomas. During his stay in Michigan, he is also a postdoctoral fellow in the China-US Scholar Program, which is administered by the International Institute of Education. Dr. Wei received his PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge and JSD from City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include judges’ gender and sentencing, sexual abuse and violence, and feminist judgments project. He received the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Division on Women and Crime, American Society of Criminology in 2019, as well as the Jiang-Land-Wang Outstanding Student Paper Award from the Association of Chinese Criminology and Criminal Justice in the same year. His publications can be found in peer-reviewed journals, such as Feminist Criminology, Feminist Legal Studies, British Journal of Criminology, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. He has been a member of the All China Lawyers Association since 2008.

Research Focus

Legal studies worldwide have documented the ways in which sentences of rape are influenced by victims’ relationships with offenders. The systematic failure to effectively sanction private sexual violence speaks to the influence of extra-legal factors on judges’ decision-making processes. Nevertheless, what typically has been found in the literature on the categorization of rape offenders is the dichotomy between strangers and non-strangers to victims. Such classification is problematic because of the distinct nature of the relationships captured in acquaintance rape. I will use a more refined categorization of victim-offender relationships to examine the predictive power of relationship type in sentencing outcomes.

Languages

Mandarin (native) and Cantonese (proficient)

Sonya Ziaja is an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she teaches Environmental Law; Climate Adaptation, Law and Equity; and Property. Ziaja holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Arizona; M.Sc. in Water Science, Policy and Management from the University of Oxford; and J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Ziaja’s research interests focus on the overlapping areas of environmental governance and law, technology and society: How can environmental law and institutions sustainably adjust to rapidly changing bio-geophysical conditions and societal demands associated with climate change? And with what consequences for equity and democratic participation? Her approach to these questions draws on her interdisciplinary background in geography, water policy and law, as well as her practical knowledge of energy regulation.

Prior to entering academia, Ziaja worked in energy regulation at the California Public Utilities Commission and was the research lead for the Water, Energy, Climate Nexus at the California Energy Commission. She was a lead author of California’s Fourth Climate Assessment. Her research has informed the climate adaptation strategy of the U.S. National Parks Service and the first climate adaptation regulation of investor-owned energy utilities in California.

Research Focus

Dr. Ziaja’s current research project examines an emerging paradox in climate adaptation and equity. Climate adaptation is necessarily dependent on algorithm assisted decision making. These algorithmic tools are new fora for deliberation and environmental lawmaking. But these necessary tools also embed value laden assumptions and biases that make them counter to democratic participation and equity. This project is based on multiple years of qualitative research and detailed analysis of two cases where decision support software has informed climate adaptation for water and energy sectors. Through these case studies, Ziaja’s research provides a novel framework for evaluating procedural and substantive equity in algorithmic tools. Early versions of this research benefitted from discussions at the University of Columbia’s Sabin Colloquium for Innovative Environmental Scholarship and the University of Michigan Law School’s Junior Scholars Conference. Ziaja’s article, How Algorithm Assisted Decision Making is Influencing Environmental Law and Climate Adaptation, is forthcoming in volume 48 of Ecology Law Quarterly.

Lorenzo Giovanni Luisetto is a Ph.D. student in Comparative and European legal studies from the University of Trento in Italy. Prior to receiving his scholarship to pursue his Ph.D, studies, he received an M.A. in law at the University of Trento. Luisetto received the Giorgio Ghezzi Award - Mention of Merit in 2018 for the adoption of a comparative and multidisciplinary method in his master’s thesis, entitled “Working Conditions at “Amazon”: a Comparison between the United States and Italy.” In 2018 he was a Visiting Researcher at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Washington D.C. (USA), and in 2020 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE), where he worked at the Institute for Labour Law. His research interests include Comparative Labor and Employment Law, Antitrust Law and EU Law.

Research Focus

Luisetto’s research focuses on the interaction between Antitrust Law and Labor and Employment Law. He is conducting a comparative study between the United States’ and the European Union’s models of anti-competition law and their application to labor issues. His research question is based on the ineffectiveness of both Labor and Employment Law in protecting workers and the possibility of antitrust principles providing better protections for workers in different kinds of labor markets. Luisetto argues that antitrust should not only focus on consumer welfare but also on other important interests, such as the welfare of workers. More generally, he believes the goals of anti-competition law should be reconsidered in order to expand protection for labor. 

Francesco Marotta is a doctoral student in commercial law at the University of Padua. He was awarded a doctoral scholarship in 2019 after submitting a research project aimed at investigating the main legal issues posed by the Italian insolvency law reform. After graduating in Law at the same university in 2017, he worked for a year and a half as a deputy Public Prosecutor’s assistant in the section of the Prosecutor’s office specialized in economic, financial and tax crimes. He currently holds lessons and seminars for students at the university during the course of Commercial Law and Business Crisis Law. Marotta published academic articles/papers on insolvency and commercial law in various Italian law reviews. He is also a member of the American Bankruptcy Institute (International member) and the International Association of Restructuring, Insolvency and Bankruptcy Professionals (INSOL). 

Research Focus

Marotta’s research interests lie primarily within international comparison of insolvency laws, with a particular emphasis on the different legislative policies aimed at preventing insolvency and promoting business rehabilitation. Marotta’s research project analyses, with a comparative approach, the differences between the Italian and American legal regimes governing the prevention of business crisis. His purpose is to verify if the U.S. system is the most suitable for preventing insolvency without jeopardizing companies themselves. In this way, it will be possible to draw several inspirations to improve the Italian insolvency law, especially considering the high percentage of businesses that will probably experience financial difficulties due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.