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ELRC Fellowship Program

In 2007-2008, the European Law Research Center inaugurated a Fellowship Program offering full and partial student and post-doctoral fellowship support to a small number of scholars pursuing research in areas related to our ongoing work.

The ELRC was established in 1991 to support research in the fields of European legal studies, comparative and international law. We have continually sought to provide an intellectual home at Harvard Law School for doctoral candidates, as well as J.D. and LL.M. students and faculty with interests in social theory, interdisciplinary scholarship and comparative legal study. The European Law Research Center encourages the development of progressive and alternative ideas about international law, society and political economy by supporting original, provocative and challenging intellectual work that might not otherwise find support from mainstream institutional resources, and which contributes to the emergence of new approaches to international law and global social justice.

Ideas do matter in global governance. Unfortunately, the range of ideas about law, politics and economy now dominant in the leading institutions of global society tend to reproduce, rather than challenge, the world’s most pressing economic and social hierarchies. We are convinced that unless intellectuals and other leaders find their critical impulses affirmed, their intellectual tools refined, and their capacity for bold and original thinking nurtured, new modes of social justice are unlikely to emerge.

In 2007 we awarded seven Fellowships to the following SJD candidates:

  • Arnulf Becker Lorca (Chile) Arnulf is in his last year of the SJD program. His project focuses on Mestizo International Law and explores aspects of the history of international law from a non-European or non-Western perspective. Arnulf will be working full time this summer to finish his dissertation and plans to take a tenure track position at Kings College in the fall.

  • Yun-Ru Chen (Taiwan) Yun-Ru is in the first year of the SJD program. Her research project is entitled “The Reconstruction of Family Law Through Legal Transplantation: A Genealogical and Comparative Study of Legal Westernization in Colonial and Post-Colonial Taiwan.”

  • Iain Frame (Scotland) Iain is in the first year of the SJD program. His research focuses on the operation of global governance.

  • Ermal Frasheri (Albania) Ermal is in the first year of the SJD Program. His thesis focuses on regional integration in the discourse of development strategies.

  • Havva Guney-Ruebenacker (Turkey) Havva is the second year of the SJD Program. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled "Towards a Feminist Islamic Jurisprudence: From Liberal Laissez-faire to Social Justice and Equitable Distribution of Wealth in Islamic Family Law."

  • Moria Paz (Israel) This May Moria successfully defended her thesis entitled “Minorities in International Governance: Three Historical Studies.” She was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

  • Hila Shamir (Israel) Hila is in the second year of the SJD program. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Care Commodified: the Legal Regulation of the Commodification of Domestic Work & Sex in Globalizing Economies.”

    • For 2008-2009, we expect to focus our Fellowship support on current HLS doctoral students and those just completing the doctorate working collaboratively with the ELRC. We are particularly interested in candidates from emerging markets and developing economies. Application is open to current Harvard Law School students.

    Applications are due by April 1, 2008, with decisions to follow. Applications should include a c.v., HLS transcript, a description of the doctoral thesis, and at least one letter of recommendation from a Harvard faculty advisor or mentor.