The University of Wisconsin Law School faculty will include three new assistant professors when classes begin in September 2007: Alexandra Huneeus, Mitra Sharafi, and Jason Yackee.
Alexandra Huneeus studies the judicialization of politics, the politics of human rights, and legal culture in Latin America. Her Ph.D. dissertation centered on the Chilean judiciary’s changing attitude towards cases of Pinochet-era human rights violations. She teaches sociology of law, human rights, Latin American legal institutions, and international law.
Before joining the UW faculty, Huneeus was a fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley (2006), and her J.D. from Boalt Hall, the Berkeley Law School (2001). As a human rights fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Boalt Hall in 2004, she supervised students bringing a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The successful challenge resulted in a ruling ordering the Dominican Republic to alter its citizenship policies and practices. She also worked on the case against Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Spain, through the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco.
Prior to her turn to law, Huneeus worked as an editor and journalist in Santiago, Chile, her native city, and in San Francisco, her home town.
Mitra Sharafi holds two law degrees, from Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the U.K., and a doctorate in history from Princeton University. Her Ph.D. dissertation is a study of law and identity in the Parsi or Indian Zoroastrian community of colonial India and Burma, and was awarded the 2007 South Asia Council’s Dissertation Prize.
Sharafi, who grew up in Canada with an Iranian father and American mother, has a personal interest in comparative cultures that led her to India, where the personal law system combines the common law with the religious legal traditions of Hindu, Muslim, and other communities. She first travelled to India during law school on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1997, and has returned many times since, particularly for archival research at the Bombay High Court in Mumbai. In 2006-7, she spent six months in India, during which time her work also took her to Pakistan and Myanmar (formerly Burma).
Sharafi’s research interests include the legal history of marriage, divorce, and trusts in colonial South Asia; Parsi and Zoroastrian studies; legal pluralism; and the history of the legal profession in the British Empire. She is an organizer of the Law and Society Association’s International Research Collaborative on South Asian Colonial Legal History. She joins UW law faculty following a two-year research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University, and a brief visiting fellowship at Griffith University’s Socio-Legal Research Center in Australia.
Jason Yackee’s research centers on international investment law, international economic relations, and foreign arbitration. He teaches Contracts, International Investment Law, International Arbitration, and other courses. His work has been published in the Journal of Politics, U.C. Davis Journal of International Law and Policy, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, and Duke Law Journal.
Yackee graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from University of Pittsburgh, earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science (International Relations) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and earned a J.D., summa cum laude, from Duke University School of Law, where he was an editor for the Duke Law Journal.
Prior to joining the faculty at the Law School, Yackee was a Fellow at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and a law clerk to Chief Judge James B. Loken, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He has also clerked with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of the Chief Counsel of International Commerce, and was a summer associate with Steptoe & Johnson LLP.
Submitted by on August 23, 2007
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