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.
First Year Scholars Second Year Scholars
Third Year Scholars LL.M. Scholars
IILJ Scholars - First Year
Note: Bios and pictures for first year students will be posted as they become available.
Valerie Brender
Valerie graduated magna cum laude with honors in Economics from Wake Forest University in 2006. While at Wake Forest, she was awarded a Richter Scholarship to study microfinance in Benin and received an Everett Public Service Grant to work with Co-op America in DC on researching socially conscious small businesses. She also spearheaded the fair labor campaign that led to Wake Forest's affiliation with the Workers' Rights Consortium. Her senior thesis on the formation of the “Chicago Boys,” a group of economists that transformed economic policy during Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, is forthcoming in The American Economist. After graduation Valerie served for two years in Panama with the Peace Corps. She worked with a rural microfinance cooperative to improve their contracts, organization and technology usage. She also served on Peace Corps Panama's Gender and Development (GAD) board where she helped promote sex-education and gender rights in local communities. 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. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ Scholar, Valerie looks forward to exploring how human rights law can be incorporated into an international development framework.
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. As an IILJ scholar at NYU, Thomas plans to continue exploring his interests in international trade law and development.
Matt Gabbard
Matt Gabbard received a B.A. from Yale University in 2007 where he double-majored in History and International Studies. He was awarded the Canadian Studies Prize by the Yale History Department and Canadian Studies Council for his scholarship into the origins of Canadian national symbols and imagery. Matt received the Babcock Summer Research Fellowship to support archival research in London for his history thesis on Lord Robert Cecil, an architect and leading British advocate of the League of Nations. In addition to his studies at Yale, he pursued coursework in the Chinese language at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Peking University in Beijing. After graduation, Matt moved to France where he worked as an English teacher in the elementary schools of the village of St. Girons, France. Immediately prior to law school, Matt worked for Alan Wasser Associates, a leading general manager of Broadway theatrical productions in New York and on tour as well as of the 2009 TONY Awards. As an IILJ Scholar at NYU, Matt looks forward to exploring specific interests in international intellectual property rights, international trade, and the development of international institutions and the European Union.
Nikki Reisch
Nikki graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Yale University in 1999, with a degree in Ethics, Politics and Economics. She has spent the decade since then working on human rights and environmental issues in international development and global economic policy, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Following graduation, Nikki served for over two years in Senegal as a health sector volunteer with the Peace Corps and subsequently worked for nine months in the SF Bay Area as a medical assistant and public health coordinator at a clinic serving low income and uninsured patients. From the fall of 2002 to late 2007, Nikki managed the Africa program of the Bank Information Center (BIC), a Washington DC-based non-profit 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 several months as an independent consultant, whose projects included co-authoring a report on the climate impacts of the Iraq war, Nikki moved to London in June 2008, where she has spent the past year working as the Policy Advisor on Forests and Climate Change at the Rainforest Foundation UK. In this post, she has examined the implications of global climate policy for forests and forest peoples, particularly in the Congo Basin, and participated actively in the UN climate negotiations. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ scholar at NYU, Nikki hopes to strengthen and diversify the tools she can bring to the struggle for justice in the global economy. She is particularly interested in international and environmental law, human rights and corporate accountability.
IILJ Scholars - Second Year
Ben Heath
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 philosophy and history, writing an honors thesis in both fields (on Kant's international political and legal theory, and the French project of democratic state-making during the early period of the Revolution). He has also worked at the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•Con) at NYU since the summer of 2007, and currently holds the position of Senior Editorial Assistant. As an IILJ scholar, Julian is excited to pursue his interests in the sources of international law, and the relation between international and constitutional legal theory.
Elizabeth Ashamu
Elizabeth graduated phi beta kappa from Yale University in 2006 with simultaneous Bachelor's and Master's degrees in African Studies. During her time at Yale, she traveled to Morocco to study Arabic, spent her junior year in Egypt at the American University in Cairo, and conducted field research in Guinea and Senegal for her Master's thesis on the history of Lebanese immigration to West Africa. Following graduation, she interned with children's and women's rights organizations in Togo. She then lived in Rwanda, where she contributed to documenting the genocide and supporting justice efforts with African Rights. Immediately before coming to NYU, Elizabeth held the position of Africa Program Coordinator with Rights and Resources Group, a coalition that works to increase household and community ownership, control and benefits from forests and trees. She has particular interests in transitional justice, African customary legal systems, and natural resource management.
Christine Chiu
Christine graduated from Stanford University in 2005 with a B.A. in Human Biology, concentration in International Development. She then moved to New York where she worked for two years as a grant writer at Human Rights Watch, writing foundation grants and reports for the Africa, Middle East and North Africa, Children's Rights, and Refugee Policy Divisions, among others. Christine spent the last year in Kigali, Rwanda where she worked as a Program Manager for Orphans of Rwanda, an organization that sends orphans and other vulnerable youth to university in Rwanda. She interned for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania through a CHRGJ human rights fellowship in the summer of 2009.
Wamiq Chowdhury
Wamiq graduated in 2006 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he focused on international law and international economics. While at Princeton he worked with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, analyzing rural education reform efforts. He then spent two years working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, where he researched issues in political economy in the Western Hemisphere, including energy cooperation in the Western Hemisphere and the policymaking effects of Mexico's dependent economic relationship with the US. He also helped develop Young Professionals in Foreign Policy in the Classroom, a program aimed to enhance education of international affairs in D.C. area schools. During summer of 2009, he interned with MP Kwaku Boateng, who represents the Berekum Constituency in the Ghanaian Parliament, as a legislative aide/policy planner. He focused primarily on ways to empower the local farmers and improve infrastructure to strengthen the agricultural base of the area. As an IILJ scholar, Wamiq hopes to explore issues in international economic law and development.
Margaret Graham
Margaret graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2004 with a B.A. in Earth Sciences. During her time at Dartmouth, she interned at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and conducted ice core research in Greenland. Her honors senior thesis examined carbon and sulfur cycling in soils, and was incorporated into a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Margaret continued soil chemistry research after graduation in the Dry Valleys, Antarctica. She then worked in Benin for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer, coordinating the environmental efforts of the local government. Margaret has also worked as a research and policy assistant for the Connecticut General Assembly. As an environmental law and IILJ scholar, Margaret looks forward to exploring the developing field of international environmental law.
Joanna Langille
Joanna received an M. Phil in International Relations from Balliol College, Oxford, where she studied as a Commonwealth Scholar and worked for the Global Economic Governance Program. Her research at Oxford focused on the role of the World Trade Organization in governing regional trade agreements. She has worked at the WTO (where she helped to implement the Transparency Mechanism for regional trade agreements) and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, as well as on trade-related projects for the Commonwealth Secretariat and Munk Centre of International Studies at the University of Toronto. At Oxford, Joanna also co-founded the G8 Research Group – Oxford, a fifty-person research team dedicated to monitoring the G8’s commitments on climate change. In 2006, Joanna graduated from the University of Toronto with a Joint Specialist in Philosophy and Political Science in 2006, where she studied on a Millennium Scholarship. As a Furman and IILJ Scholar, Joanna is excited to pursue her interest in legal theory and global governance.
Dara Young
Dara Young received a B.A. from Yale University in May of 2007 where she majored in Ethics, Politics and Economics with a concentration in Ethnic Conflict & Political Violence. She has spent the year since graduation working for the Clinton Global Initiative University - a new project of the William J. Clinton Foundation aimed at creating a community of university students taking action to address global issues. As leader of the CGI U Commitments Development team, Dara worked with student activists from around the world assisting them in project development, implementation and fund raising.
IILJ Scholars – Third Year
Brian Abrams
Brian graduated with a Masters in Law and Diplomacy in 2006 from the Fletcher School at Tufts University where he focused on security studies and public international law. Following Fletcher, Brian worked on proliferation and illicit finance issues at the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. In 2005, he interned in the Political-Military Bureau of the U.S. State Department and worked on the establishment of the Global Peace Operations Initiative, a G-8 program to develop global peace and stability operations capacity. Brian graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in 2001 with a double major in History and Political Science. He has also held positions at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the International Institute of Boston, the Human Rights Documentation Exchange, Foley & Lardner LLP, and Goodwin Procter LLP. During the summer of 2009, he worked on international arbitration and trade issues at a law firm in Washington DC before attending the general course on public international law at the Hague Academy for International Law. As an IILJ Scholar, Brian's interest is focused on international law regarding the use of force and legal issues surrounding the involvement of regional organizations in peace and stability operations.
Tess Bridgeman
Tess received a Masters of Philosophy in International Relations in 2006 and is currently completing a D.Phil. at Oxford University where she studied for three years on a Rhodes Scholarship. Tess also worked with the Global Economic Governance Programme in Oxford as a research coordinator and was Associate Managing Editor of the Oxford International Review. Prior to attending Oxford, Tess worked at the World Bank Inspection Panel – an accountability mechanism established to conduct independent investigations when communities allege they have been harmed by Bank-funded projects. She graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with Distinction in Human Biology, an interdisciplinary program combining natural and social sciences. Tess is a 2002 Truman Scholar, received a Dean's Award for Academic Accomplishment, and is a 2003 John Gardner Fellow. In 2000, she co-founded Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, a non-profit organization that conducts community development, food security , and women's health programs in Oaxaca, Mexico. As a Root-Tilden-Kern and IILJ Scholar at NYU Law School, Tess has continued working on accountability of international institutions. She has presented findings and recommendations from her D.Phil. to U.S. Congressional staff, World Bank Executive Directors, and civil society groups, and is assisting in drafting related legislation. In Summer 2008, Tess was a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee, working for the Chief Counsel on Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security.
Ted Cardos
Ted Cardos grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and in 2002, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri, with degrees in Philosophy and Political Science. He then moved to South Africa for two years, where he completed a post-graduate course in Film and Television Production at the Cape Town International Film School. While there, Ted represented CTIFS at an international TV competition with a project about the discrimination of the disabled, and worked on documentaries about homophobia in African society and the stigma of AIDS in South Africa. After film school, Ted worked in Frankfurt, where he wrote a film script about Apartheid, which was bought by a German TV company. Back in the States, he was Assistant Director on the TV show, "Elimidate". Looking for a new challenge, he took an internship on the "Africa and Human Rights Subcommittee" in the House of Representatives. Most recently, Ted worked in Lithuania on a BBC news feature about the expansion of the EU visa zone and its effects of Belarusian bargain hunters. His focus as IILJ Scholar includes human rights and corruption issues.
Nikhil (Niki) Dutta
After graduating Magna Cum Laude in chemistry and Physics from Harvard in 2002, Niki worked in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan for two years, and later worked in Azerbaijan for the American Bar Association's Central and European Law Initiative on anti-corruption and rule of law initiatives, acquiring reasonably fluent Russian during that time. He completed the two-year Masters of Public Affairs program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton immediately before starting at NYU Law School, where he is particularly focused on law and development issues. Nikhil currently serves as the Editor in Chief of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics. He spent his first summer at NYU working on the Access to Justice Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, and split his second summer between the Brooklyn Family Defense Project and Catholic Charities Immigration Services. At NYU, Nikhil has worked closely with Prof. Kevin Davis on IILJ's Financing Development project, with Prof. Richard Stewart on the Global Administrative Law project, and with Prof. Benedict Kingsbury on IILJ's Indicators Project.
David Jacobson
David earned his B.A. in History from Columbia University in 2006. He is primarily interested in transatlantic approaches to the Middle East, and he has a background in U.S., German, and Middle Eastern politics. Most recently, David worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes in Washington, where he focused on international money laundering activity and laws. He spent 2006-2007 at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a policy think-tank where he researched terrorist groups and state sponsors of terrorism, U.S. and European security interests, and counterterrorism and sanctions programs. David has worked for the American Jewish Committee in Berlin, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's historical research division, the Anti-Defamation League's Government and National Affairs Office in Washington, and the Investigative Project on Terrorism in Washington. He has lived and studied in both Germany and Israel and speaks fluent German and Hebrew. In 2009, he was a summer associate at Proskauer Rose in New York working on international art restitution litigation involving claims of art stolen during the Nazi regime. During the 2009-10 fall semester, he will be a visiting student at Georgetown University and return to NYU during the spring. As an IILJ Scholar, his interests lie in legal issues pertaining to relationships between the United States, European Union, and Middle Eastern states.
Do Hyun Kim
After high school in Paris, Do Hyun returned to Korea and graduated first in her class at the Ewha Women's University - her thesis there on Korea's legislation against human trafficking was published in Harvard's Korea Policy Review. She then worked for the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where she was actively involved in negotiation of the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement.
In the summer of 2009, she worked as a summer associate at the New York office of the international law firm Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, focusing on cross-border transactional work, especially M&A and project finance. The year before that, in the summer of her 1L year, she worked at the New York office of Nixon Peabody, focusing on labor law and public finance matters. As a current Senior Executive Editor of the NYU Law Review, Do Hyun is actively involved in the journal's production process and is also concentrating on developing her own Note on international arbitration, a topic inspired by the IILJ Scholars' Seminar and Scholars' Conference in which she participated during her 2L year. As an IILJ Scholar, she focuses particularly on the implications of international economic law for development agendas and for East Asian security and cooperation.
(Sophy) Qian Wang
Sophy went to Fudan University in China in1996 and earned a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2000. Three years later she received a M.Phil degree in philosophy from the University of Hong Kong. Professor Chad Hansen supervised her M.Phil thesis “Comparative Studies of the Justification of Punishment.” In the same year she began her Ph.D. study at the Philosophy Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. Professor Bruce Brower directed her dissertation “John Rawls’s Ideas on Human Rights”, which she defended just before she started law school. In the summer of 2009, she was a summer associate at Blank Rome LLP's New York office.
IILJ Scholars - LL.M.
Mitra Ebadolahi
As an IILJ Fellow, Filomen D'Agostino Scholar, and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow at NYU Law, Mitra specialized in international and domestic human rights, particularly economic and social rights. In 2007-08, she served as the Senior Notes Editor for the NYU Law Review, writing her own Note on strengthening the judicial enforceability of economic and social rights in South Africa. She spent her 1L summer on a CHRGJ fellowship at the Constitutional Litigation Unit of the Legal Resources Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, and her 2L summer at the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project in New York City. Mitra participated in the NYU Law International Human Rights Clinic in 2007, working on Freedom of Information Act requests and enforced disappearances in the War on Terror. A 2002 graduate of UCLA, Mitra Ebadolahi received her BA in international development studies and history. She then received a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the London School of Economics, where she completed an MSc degree in Politics of the World Economy in 2004. At the LSE, Mitra graduated first in her class and received the department's award for best dissertation for her paper on the Political Economy of Human Rights. In 2008-09, Mitra returned to Los Angeles to clerk for Judge Margaret Morrow, U.S. District Court, Central District of California.
