2021-2022 Visiting Researchers
Prakhar Bhardwaj
Prakhar Bhardwaj
Prakhar Bhardwaj completed his Masters in Law from Harvard Law School in January 2022 as a Nehru Fulbright Scholar. Prakhar’s research focuses on developing critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on international economic law with a special focus on adjudication and negotiating dynamics at the World Trade Organization. Before Harvard, Prakhar was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Trade and Investment Law, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India. Prakhar advised on critical trade policy issues, including on the drafting of submissions on behalf of India for disputes at the WTO and on negotiating positions relating to reforms at the WTO. Additionally, Prakhar was also part of the Indian delegation to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a mega free trade agreement which at that time was being negotiated with 15 other countries, including Japan, Australia, China, and Korea.
As a Visiting Researcher, Prakhar will be focussing on disciplinary and judicial tendencies of the highest judicial body of the WTO, the Appellate Body, especially in relation to international subsidies regulation. Select publications (including co-authored articles) include: ‘Towards a Coherent Theory of Panel Recommendations for Expired Measures’, 22(3) J. INT’L ECO. L. (Sept. 2019) 483-502 and Situating India’s Mode 4 Commitments in Geopolitics and Political Economy: The case of GATS-2000 Proposal, India-Singapore CECA and India-ASEAN TiS,12(1) TRADE LAW & DEV. 299-341.
Sigrid Boysen
Sigrid Boysen
Sigrid Boysen, Dr. iur. (Hamburg) is professor of International and European Law at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg. She serves as editor-in-chief of the international law review “Archiv des Völkerrechts” and on the board of the Institute for European Integration, Europa-Kolleg Hamburg. Previously she was associate professor at Free University Berlin and Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs). Her research focuses on international law, with a particular focus on the theory of international law, international environmental and economic law and constitutional law. Her current research project “International Law and its Environments: The law & politics of natural resources in the postcolonial order” aims at rethinking the foundations of international environmental law.
Selected publications: Die postkoloniale Konstellation. Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne, Mohr Siebeck 2021; “Equality and Diversity in Constitutional Discourses”, in: Dann/Thiruvengadam (eds.), Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the European Union: Comparing the Law of Democracy in Continental Polities, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, pp. 104 et seq. (with Aparna Chandra); “Remnants of a Constitutional Moment: The Right to Democracy in International Law”, in: von Arnauld/von der Decken/Susi (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook on New Human Rights, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 465 et seq. Forthcoming: The Law & Politics of Transnational Forest Governance, Cambridge University Press (with Shawkat Alam and Jona Razzaque), accepted for 2022.
John Brake
John Brake
John Brake researches the social dynamics of global governance regimes and states’ costly compliance with international rules across a wide array of issue areas, from military intervention to nuclear proliferation to climate change mitigation. His graduate work has drawn upon the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman to explore “performative restraint” in international politics. This project provides a novel theoretical framework for how the expression of national exceptionalism, typically associated with bellicose and disruptive foreign policies, can also lead to rule-following and prosociality. John is now extending these ideas into the domains of international human rights law and the laws of war. His other research interests include, broadly, the historical sociology of Chinese law and politics, and normative questions in US-China relations.
John is currently completing his PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Marshall Scholar and has also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He holds an MMS in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he was a Schwarzman Scholar, and a BA in Politics with highest distinction from the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Scholar. John will pursue his JD in the University of Chicago Law School’s Class of 2025.
widespread online surveillance by both the state and private entities. He has also done research on how copyright law can get in the way of the exercise of the rights to seek, impart and receive information of the user.
He holds a PhD in Communication Law and Policy from Complutense University of Madrid, a Master’s in International Law from Instituto de Estudios Bursátiles/Instituto Superior de Derecho y Economía, in Madrid, and a holds a Bachelor’s in Law from Marist University in Mexico. He is the Vice-Chair of the Law Section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
Klaas Eller
Klaas Eller
Klaas Hendrik Eller is an Assistant Professor at Amsterdam Law School. His research interests are centered around the spatial and distributive effects of private and economic law. His work explores how law co-constitutes and connects sites of the global economy, such as along global value chains, in financialized real estate and urban infrastructure. Klaas is part of the IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group that co-authored a Research Manifesto on the role of law in global value chains (London Review of International Law 2016). In 2022, he was awarded a 3-year ‘Veni’ grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for his project ‘Recoding Global Production’, a legal ethnographic analysis of compliance practices along global value chains with a focus on the electronics sector.
Klaas received his legal education in Germany and France and passed the German bar exam (Referendariat) at the High Court of Berlin with secondments inter alia at the Supreme Court of the State of Israel (Justice Daphne Barak-Erez) and at an international arbitration boutique. He earned his PhD from the University of Cologne, Germany (2019), and later was a Fellow both at Tel Aviv University’s and Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics as well as a Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University. He is a co-editor-in-chief of the German Law Journal.