Katerina Linos teaches international business transactions, international law, European Union law, and international organizations.
She is best known for her research on the diffusion of ideas around the world. Her book “The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries” won three national awards. She documents that laws don’t spread only through expert networks, but also through popular movements. Politicians can win elections by advocating for tried-and-true, mainstream models. Therefore, the same law is often adopted around the world, even in countries for which it is a poor fit.
Linos also studies how information and misinformation shape refugee and migration law. Through a Carnegie fellowship, she studied how government and international organization reticence allows for misinformation to spread among migrants, opening up space for rights violations and smuggling. In Digital Refuge, Linos presents the European refugee crisis from the perspective of migrants, drawing on thousands of interviews and Facebook posts. In Responsibility Sharing or Responsibility Dumping? she evaluates both progressive and conservative innovations in refugee law.
Linos has researched how the media translate US Supreme Court opinions; how public opinion cleavages form around the world; how the European Union influences legislation not only through compliance mechanisms, but also through diffusion processes; and how UN General Assembly templates shape the design of institutions around the world.
Linos’ research is empirical and focused on developing and applying new qualitative and quantitative methods. Her work appears in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the California Law Review, the Chicago Law Review, Comparative Political Studies, the European Sociological Review, and International Organization. Linos is the host of the international law podcast Borderlines, through which she is creating a joint archive of judges’ biographies with the Court of Justice of the European Union.
As a 2024-25 CASBS fellow, she is researching how the EU develops comprehensive initiatives rapidly in the fields of technology, finance and migration.
Education
B.A., Harvard College (2000)
Diploma, European University Institute (2002)
J.D., Harvard Law School (2006)
Ph.D., Harvard University (2007)
Katerina Linos is teaching the following courses in Spring 2026:
• 261 sec. 001 - International Law
• 261.1 sec. 001 - International Business Transactions
• 261.98 sec. 001 - The European Union's Transformation: From Brexit to Breakthrough
Courses During Other Semesters
| Semester | Course Num | Course Title |  Teaching Evaluations | Summer 2026 | 261.1S sec. 001 | International Business Transactions | Summer 2025 | 261.1S sec. 001 | International Business Transactions | View Teaching Evaluation |
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Q&A: Linos’ Carnegie Fellowship and the Global Refugee Crisis
Linos will study an urgent global challenge: the European refugee crisis.
Katerina Linos Awarded a Prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship
Each fellow receives up to $200,000 to fund significant research in the social sciences and humanities—the most generous stipend of its kind.