Matilde Masetti Placci recently completed her doctorate at the University of Edinburgh Law School under the supervision of Professor Nehal Bhuta and Professor Andrew Lang. Her research agenda pushes against monodisciplinary, State-centric approaches to international law by instead focusing on the international law as an interdisciplinary, interpersonal practice. Her doctoral thesis explored the widely held but underexamined belief amongst international lawyers that they share a common legal project. To this end, she drew upon the untranslated works of theorists Georg Jellinek (1851-1911), Maurice Hauriou (1856-1929), and Santi Romano (1875-1947) to recover unexplored ways of thinking about how lawyers construct the international legal order. Beyond her thesis, she explores these themes in the fields of global gender governance and international law and technology.

During the 2026-2027 academic year, she will be based at NYU as a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow. During her stay, she will be working on her postdoctoral project, which draws upon the works of Maurice Hauriou to examine how purpose is continually (re)constructed within international organizations. In doing so, she seeks to make two distinct contributions to international legal scholarship: to advance international organizations theory by centering and problematizing the concept of institutional purpose in a new, interdisciplinary way, and to attend to this problem with new conceptual tools drawn from the works of an underexplored European legal theorist.

Center Affiliation: The Remarque Institute
Research Project: Towards a Sociolegal Theory of International Institutional Change