About Us
IILJ Scholars in J.D. & J.D.-LL.M. Programs
IILJ Scholars Program - Details and Application Information
For Graduate Scholars, see separate listing.
The Institute for International Law and Justice each year selects a small group of outstanding J.D. students as IILJ Scholars. The Program provides carefully tailored individualized mentoring and opportunities to this group. Scholars work closely with the Law School's permanent and global faculty members in international law on joint research projects. They participate in the development of ideas and scholarship with other IILJ JD and Graduate Scholars from around the world, and with Visiting Fellows and Researchers. They are carefully selected to draw upon, and enrich, an exceptionally fertile and energetic intellectual community.
IILJ Scholars take part in IILJ events throughout their time at law school. The third year students, together with IILJ LL.M. and Graduate Scholars, typically participate also in a weekly IILJ seminar on international law research and scholarship, designed to assist them in producing far-reaching research papers for eventual publication.
Scholars are selected either before coming to Law School, or at the end of their second year. Many stay at the Law School for a 4th year, in the IILJ's J.D.-LL.M. program.
NYU 's pioneering J.D.-LL.M. program for prospective academics and international law specialists is believed to be the only one of its kind in international law in the U.S.
Recent cohorts of Scholars have taken up a range of positions following graduation. Many Scholars accept clerkships in US Circuit and District Courts, the US Court of International Trade, in international courts, including the International Court of Justice. Some take up positions in leading firms (including, in the period 2008-2011, Skadden; White & Case; Freshfields; Debevoise & Plimpton; Sidley Austin and Cleary Gottlieb) or in government, particularly the State Department. Other Scholars are undertaking fellowships with a range of NGO and advocacy organizations, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Reproductive Rights and New Orleans Public Defenders. More information about the opportunities for Scholars to work with different organizations both during and following the J.D. is available under Professional Experience.
First Year Scholars Second Year Scholars
Third Year Scholars LL.M. Scholars
IILJ Scholars – First Year
Will Henrich
Will graduated magna cum laude from Connecticut College in 2008 with a major in Philosophy and a minor in Linguistics. He earned Honors for his thesis on Wittgenstein and earned Distinction and the Prof. Lester Reiss Prize for his work in philosophy. The School for International Training's Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Program let him study in India and Bhutan for one semester of college. After college, Will taught English and art at an elementary and middle school in southern Thailand. In 2010, he returned to the United States to teach art at a center for adults with mental disabilities and to tutor private students in academics and test-preparation.
Julianne Marley
Julianne graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Boston College in 2006, where she majored in International Studies, minored in French, and was a member of the Arts & Sciences Honors Program. She also spent a year studying at the Institut Catholique de Paris, focusing on international politics and French literature and cinema. Prior to NYU, Julianne worked for several years as the managing paralegal of a boutique estate planning and settlement law firm in New York. She also served as a marketing and development volunteer for a New York-based international fair trade nonprofit organization and as the writing coordinator for a college readiness program in the Bronx.
IILJ Scholars – Second Year
Hannah Bloch-Wehba
A New York City native, Hannah graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas, where she majored in history and Plan II Honors, in 2009. While at UT, she taught writing at the Undergraduate Writing Center, ran a tutoring program matching honors students with local high schoolers, and edited the university's literary journal, Analecta. She received special honors for her thesis on presidential war powers. After graduating, she received a DAAD scholarship for graduate study in Germany, where she interned at Internationale Politik, a foreign affairs publication, and studied international relations. As an IILJ and Law and Security Scholar, she plans to focus on international humanitarian law, constitutional law, and the law of the war on terrorism.
Matt Craig
Matt Craig attended the University of North Carolina as a Morehead-Cain Scholar. He studied Political Science and Spanish, earning highest honors for his thesis on the normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations. His undergraduate career was marked by time spent in Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Rwanda, and South Africa, where he undertook research and performed community service. While at UNC, Matt served as executive director of Students for Students International, a non-profit organization that provides scholarships and other educational opportunities to students in Tanzania. After completing his undergraduate studies, Matt received a Specialization in Armed Conflict and Peace at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. He also worked for the University of North Carolina Center for Global Initiatives and the non-profit organization, Carolina for Kibera. Matt spent his 1L summer working for Paul Hoffman on a variety of Alien Tort Statute and other human rights cases. For 2011-2012, he will be the case manager for the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project as well as a staff editor for the Journal of International Law and Politics. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ Scholar, Matt looks forward to further pursuit of his interests in international law and national security.
Elspeth Faiman
Elspeth graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College in 2004. At Bowdoin, she majored in International Relations and Russian and minored in Economics, earning High Honors for her senior thesis on international cooperation in the Baltic Sea region. During college, she also studied in Avignon, France, Yaroslavl, Russia, and Washington, DC. After graduating, Elspeth served for two years as a Peace Corps Health Education Volunteer in a small rural village in Mali. Upon returning to the US, she worked for three and a half years at Management Sciences for Health in Boston, where she managed public health projects in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As an IILJ scholar at NYU, Elspeth is enjoying exploring the intersections between international law, environmental law, and international development. She spent the summer after her first year at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Philadelphia, where she worked on hazardous waste management issues. She is a member of NYU’s Journal of International Law and Politics, and is on the board of the Environmental Law Society.
Adria Gulizia
Adria graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. While there, she majored in French language and literature, a course of study to which she had been dedicated since spending a term in Grenoble, France as a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. Adria used her background in French language and culture to anchor her interest in the circulation of peoples, goods and ideas around the Mediterranean, an interest that prompted her to begin studying Arabic and increase her mastery of Italian. After graduating from Washington University, Adria remained in St. Louis, where, for two years, she taught mathematics at Gateway Middle School as a Teach For America corps member. She spent the summer prior to entering law school practicing her Italian by traveling in northern Italy with her Milanese husband. During the summer of 2011, Adria interned for the American Friends Service Committee's Immigrant Rights Program in Newark, NJ. She gave assistance to immigrants and refugees by taking statements, doing legal research and writing, translating documents from French to English and interpreting between French and English. As an IILJ scholar, Adria hopes to explore international economic law and international financial law.
Elena Lobo
A native of Washington, DC, Elena graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in International Relations concentrating on race and culture within the African Diaspora. Elena has studied in Ecuador, France, and most recently spent a semester in Brazil. While at Brown, Elena was President of the Cape Verdean Students Association and a member of New Works World Traditions, a dance company committed to raising awareness for political and cultural issues through West African and modern dance performance. Upon graduating in 2008, Elena traveled to Mali with the company to study Mande dance and collaborate with local activists to advance malaria prevention. She has worked at the International Monetary Fund in the Monetary and Capital Markets Division and at Foley Hoag, LLP as a paralegal in their International Litigation and Arbitration Practice. During the summer of 2011, Elena interned in the Civil Division of the US Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of New York and participated in the 2011 Copenhagen Competition on Access to Food. Elena is currently a member of NYU's Moot Court Board. Elena looks forward to further expanding her world view as an IILJ Scholar by exploring international arbitration and reproductive/children's rights.
Alex Sinha
Alex holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in normative ethics, bioethics and philosophy of law. He defended his dissertation, "The Justification of Deontology," in December of 2010. In it, he canvasses historically prominent deontological systems (duty-based moral theories like Kantianism) and offers a novel approach to grounding deontology. His approach is designed in particular to provide a compelling theoretical justification for agent-centered restrictions, which are rules that prohibit agents from bringing about objectively optimal states of affairs. A strong justification for such restrictions appears essential to forming a proper understanding of the basis and scope of a large range of claim rights, both in a moral and a legal sense, and that is a subject he plans to pursue further at NYU Law. His paper, "Modernizing the Virtue of Humility," is forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Alex graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with Honors in Philosophy from the New York University College of Arts and Sciences in 2005, where he majored in Philosophy and Religious Studies. His undergraduate Honors Thesis explores a Rawlsian, contractualist approach to morality in war, arguing that an egalitarian negotiating situation based on Rawls’ “Original Position,” when applied differently, can yield consequentialist-friendly results directly contrary to those Rawls himself derived in A Theory of Justice. He spent his 1L summer working for the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and serving as a research assistant for Professor Smita Narula. As an IILJ Scholar at NYU, Alex hopes to pursue an interest in both applied and theoretical work on human rights and civil liberties.
Carson Thomas
Born and raised in Carson City, Nevada, Carson studied English and Spanish at Carleton College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2006. While at Carleton, he lived in Madrid and then received a Larsen Fellowship to pursue his grandfather’s narrative in Chile. He earned a M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, focusing his research on the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare in pre-Civil War Spain. Carson then taught culture and conversation classes for a year at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He also led groups of American teenagers in Spain and conducted teacher-training workshops in Mexico and Nepal for the Rassias Foundation of Dartmouth College. Although Carson has traveled extensively, his outlook remains informed by the mountains and deserts of his home. He worked to protect and develop natural resources as a professional ski patroller, state park employee and conservation steward. Carson spent his first law school summer interning in Geneva at the United Nations' International Law Commission. He researched and edited proposals for the codification and progressive development of public international law, and his projects included the Protection of the Environment In Relation to Armed Conflict and International Cyber Law. As an IILJ Scholar and legal professional, he hopes to mediate conflicts at the intersection of international environmental and human rights law.
IILJ Scholars – Third Year
Valerie Brender
Valerie graduated magna cum laude with honors in Economics from Wake Forest University in 2006. Her senior thesis on the formation of the “Chicago Boys,” a group of economists that transformed economic policy during Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, was published in the Spring 2010 edition of The American Economist. After graduation Valerie served for two years in Panama with the Peace Corps. In Panama, she worked with a rural microfinance cooperative and served on Peace Corps Panama's Gender and Development (GAD) board. After the Peace Corps, she was awarded a Fulbright teaching grant to Spain. While in Spain she taught in a bilingual public school and worked with a Spanish refugee group, CEAR, on translations and human rights research. Valerie spent her 1L summer working for Paul Hoffman on Guantanamo Bay, Alien Tort Statute and other international human rights litigation cases. From 2010-2011 she chaired the Iraqi Refugee Assistant Project’s TCN Project, which filed a series of FOIA requests concerning the labor abuses against and trafficking of third country nationals on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. She spent her 2L summer working for the ACLU’s Center for Democracy on human rights and national security litigation. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ Scholar, Valerie has enjoyed exploring human rights litigation and corporate accountability.
Thomas Earnest
A native of rural northern Alabama, Thomas graduated with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007 where he majored in International Affairs with a minor in the Philosophy of Science and Technology. During his time at Georgia Tech, Thomas was a member of the Board of Directors for the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, traveled to Argentina and Brazil where he filmed a documentary on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and studied educational programs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and spent a summer living in Europe practicing his French. Following graduation, Thomas moved to Cairo, Egypt as a recipient of the State Department's Critical Language Scholarship. During his six months in Cairo studying Arabic, he also volunteered at the St. Andrew's Refugee Services providing language and vocational training to Iraqi and Sudanese refugees living in Cairo. Most recently, Thomas was a Fulbright Research Scholar and affiliated scholar of the Centre d'Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis living in Tunisia researching the intersection between Tunisia's trade and development policies, while also continuing his Arabic studies as a Critical Language Enhancement Award winner. He has also served in several capacities in state and federal politics, including as a staff member of the 2006 reelection campaign for Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and as a Congressional staff member on Capitol Hill. Thomas spent the summer following his 1L year at the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office working on national security and privacy issues. During his 2L summer, Thomas was a summer associate at the Houston, Texas office of Vinson & Elkins, LLP where he worked on a broad range of legal issues including an international investor-state arbitration dispute and several overseas acquisitions and investments. As an IILJ Scholar, Thomas' research interests focus on international and national security, foreign investment and development.
Nikki Reisch
Nikki graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Yale University in 1999, with a degree in Ethics, Politics and Economics. She spent the next decade working on human rights and environmental issues in international development policy, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Following graduation, Nikki was a public health sector volunteer with the Peace Corps in Senegal for over two years. From late 2002 through 2007, Nikki managed the Africa program of the Bank Information Center (BIC), a Washington DC-based organization that works to democratize development decision-making, safeguard rights and ensure accountability in the operations of the World Bank and other international financial institutions. Much of her work at BIC focused on human rights, natural resources, international trade and development, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of oil, gas and mineral extraction in Africa. After working as an independent consultant, whose projects included co-authoring a report on the climate impacts of the Iraq war, Nikki moved to London in 2008, where she spent the year prior to law school as the Policy Advisor on Forests and Climate Change at the Rainforest Foundation UK. In this post, she examined the implications of global climate policy for forests and forest-dependent peoples, particularly in the Congo Basin, and participated actively in the UN climate negotiations. She spent her 1L summer working on climate policy and environmental litigation at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, and supporting international human rights litigation at EarthRights International in Washington, DC. During the summer of 2011, Nikki was a legal intern with the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, where she worked on a study investigating the links between violations of economic and social rights and gender-based violence in Haiti, and litigation on behalf of clients seeking redress for abuses committed as part of the CIA's secret detention and rendition program. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ scholar at NYU, Nikki seeks to strengthen and diversify the tools she can bring to the struggle for global justice. She is particularly interested in human rights, international economic and environmental law, corporate accountability and civil litigation.
Kaveri Vaid
Originally from Rochester, NY, Kaveri Vaid graduated from Williams College in 2004 with honors in English Literature. After graduation, she taught math and science in New Orleans for Teach for America. Kaveri then moved to New York City and spent four years at Carnegie Corporation of New York, working on immigration and education reform grantmaking programs. She also completed a MA in Political Science/International Relations at Columbia University in 2007. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she worked as a research assistant for the Center on Law and Security, and during the summer of 2010 Kaveri worked for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. In 2010, she was, with the NYU team, a semifinalist in the Jean-Pictet Competition in International Humanitarian Law. She is a Senior Articles Editor for the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics for the 2011-2012 term. Kaveri's research interests focus on international criminal law, the laws of war, and international and national security, and particularly how those areas of law intersect with international relations, and she is eager to pursue work in these areas as an IILJ Scholar.
IILJ Scholars – LL.M.
Julian Arato
Julian received an M.Phil in Intellectual History and Political Thought from King's College, Cambridge University in 2008. He wrote his dissertation on A.V. Dicey's constitutional theory, focusing the non-legal normative elements entailed in the concept of a constitution—the "conventions" and "principles" of a constitution. Julian graduated magna cum laude from Columbia College in 2007, where he studied history and philosophy. As an IILJ Scholar at NYU, Julian has focused on the sources and structure of public international law, writing in particular on techniques of treaty interpretation over time (his published work is available on SSRN, here). During the summer of 2009 Julian worked at the United Nations International Law Commission, contributing to the topic “Treaties over time.” The following summer, in 2010, Julian worked as a Stagiare / Study Visitor at the European Court of Human Rights in the Research Division. He was Senior Articles Editor on the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics for the 2010-2011 term, and has represented the School of Law at the Phillip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition in 2010 and 2011. During the summer of 2011, Julian worked at Freshfields Bruckhaus & Deringer in the Dispute Resolution Group, assisting in litigation and international arbitration issues.
J. Benton (Ben) Heath
Ben graduated with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin, with a major in philosophy and a minor in American studies. At Texas, he was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Texan, one of the country's largest student newspapers. From 2006-08, he worked as a copy editor, first as an intern for the New York Times news service, and then professionally for The Advocate in Stamford, Conn. During the summer of 2009, he worked with the United Nations International Law Commission in Geneva, contributing to draft articles on the "protection of persons in the event of disasters." In 2010, he worked with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on the topic of civil-military relations in disaster relief. Ben holds a J.D. from NYU Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, a coach of the NYU Jessup Moot Court team, a finalist in the Jean Pictet Competition on International Humanitarian Law. Ben's thesis project centers on the role of international organizations as emergency managers. His research interests include international organizations, the law of war, disaster response, legal theory, international criminal law, and global administrative law. (SSRN page here). In 2013, he will serve as a judicial clerk for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals (Second Circuit).
