Postdoctoral Scholars and Doctoral Fellows

Carolina Paulesu is Postdoctoral Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute. Her doctoral thesis (‘Structurally Unjust Production and Consumption. A Youngian Theory of Private Law’) investigated the contribution of consumer contract law to the structural injustice of capitalist production and consumption processes. At the BCPLT, Carolina will continue working on the relationship between private law and structural injustices. Her research interests include private law theory, theories of justice, European private law, feminist theory and social reproduction theory, and the relationship between law and capitalism.

Carolina holds a Master’s Degree in Law from the University of Milan, an LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and an LL.M. in Comparative, European and International Laws from the European University Institute. She was Fulbright Schuman Visiting Researcher at Yale Law School, and visiting researcher at the Dickson Poon School of Law (King’s College London). She is currently book review editor at the Journal of Law and Political Economy (JLPE).

Anna Stelle is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. She researches and teaches in the areas of contract, property, torts, and legal theory, with particular focus on the normative foundations of private law rules and institutions. Lying at the intersection of law, philosophy, and politics, her work uses philosophical tools to investigate doctrinal legal issues, explores questions about the intersection of private law and social justice, and examines the political, moral, and ethical dimensions of private law associations. 

Anna received her law degree from the University of Oxford and her LLM and PhD from University College London (UCL), supported by a Faculty of Laws Research Scholarship. During her time at UCL she was awarded the Modern Law Review Scholar Prize (2022, 2023), and the Sybil Campbell Research Award from the British Federation of Women Graduates (2024). In the UCL Faculty of Laws she taught contract, property, and trusts & equity; convened courses in feminist legal theory and tort theory; and co-convened the Foundations of Private Law LLB course. She has also taught contract law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, tort at the University of Sydney, and political philosophy and aesthetics in the UCL Department of Philosophy. Prior to undertaking her PhD she worked in human rights litigation and as a Researcher for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and from 2023-2026 she served as Managing Editor at the Aristotelian Society. 

Nina is a corporate law scholar. As a Ph.D. student in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law, her research focuses on empirical analysis of the modern American corporation. Her dissertation examines the structure of corporate board committees, drawing on private law theory and law & economics. 

Nina holds a J.D. from NYU Law, where she was a Furman Academic Scholar. Before pursuing J.D./Ph.D. studies, Nina served for four years as an economic and foreign policy advisor in Congress. She also has a Masters in Global Affairs (Economics & Business Concentration) from Tsinghua University, supported by the Schwarzman Scholarship, and a B.A. in Ethics, Politics & Economics from Yale University. She is originally from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Alex Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science (Political Theory) at UC Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, Alex received his B.A. from Peking University (Philosophy) and his M.A. from Duke University (Political Science: Political Theory). Alex works on the history of moral and political philosophy, with a particular interest in the architectonics and justifications of a group of deontic categories: law, justice, and obligation; for his dissertation, Alex is working on Kant and political obligation. Alex’s works have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Kantian Review.

Debadatta Bose is a postdoctoral scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory (BCPLT). Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University, The Netherlands where he contributed to studying the overlap between labor law and corporate responsibility law. Debadatta’s research focuses on the intersection of public international law and private law theory, with a particular emphasis on corporate responsibility for adverse human rights impacts of business activities. He is equally passionate about Third World Approaches to International Law and decolonial approaches to law more broadly. He has enriched the academic experience of students at the University of Amsterdam through his courses on international investment law, and international law and sustainable development, and at Tilburg University through his courses on obligations and contracts law, and international labor law and globalization.

At BCPLT, Debadatta will research on articulating postcolonial private law through Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s theory of relational justice. This builds on his Ph.D. where, using relational justice theory, he articulated a transnational corporate responsibility to prevent and mitigate adverse human rights impacts in corporate supply chains.

Debadatta is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on Law and Responsible Business, and his scholarship has been widely published internationally in journals like the ICSID Review and the Business and Human Rights Journal. He was the (co-)Chair of the Working Group on Business and Human Rights at the Netherlands National Network for Human Rights Research, the Dutch national body of human rights academics.

He earned his Ph.D. from the Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, his LL.M. (cum laude) in International and European Union Law from Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and his B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, India. He was the valedictorian in both his LL.M. and B.A. LL.B. (Hons.). He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.

Sarah Cohen is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy Department at Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of moral, legal, and political philosophy, with a particular focus on questions about the normative foundations of criminal law, constitutional law, family law, and torts. Sarah received her B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University and a J.D. with High Honors from The University of Chicago Law School, where she was a David M. Rubenstein Scholar and an Ernst Freund Fellow in Law and Philosophy. Before coming to Berkeley, she clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and worked as a Fellow Attorney in the Family Law Unit at Greater Boston Legal Services.

Jorge is a Chilean lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at Berkeley Law. He received his law degree from the University of Chile Law School and his LL.M. from Berkeley Law. He is qualified to practice as a barrister in Chile, where he worked at the Chilean Office of the Criminal Prosecutor. Before coming to Berkeley, he also spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Auckland Law School, New Zealand, researching theoretical issues of fact-finding procedures in Criminal Law.

Jorge’s research interests lie at the intersection of law and politics, with emphasis on the relationship between democracy and the rule of law. His dissertation examines how this relationship is expressed in criminal justice institutions, but he is interested more broadly in the way it appears in other areas of law, including private law—for instance, in the role of regulatory agencies in regulating contractual relationships. He also has interests in methodology in legal theory and in the nature of law as a social institution. In all these areas, he draws on legal theory, political theory, social theory, and comparative law. His work in Spanish has been published in Ius et Praxis, and in English in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Pinchas Huberman (J.S.D., Yale Law School, J.D., University of Toronto, Faculty of Law) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. He was previously a Resident Fellow with the Yale Information Society Project and a Doctoral Fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Pinchas’ research interests include tort law, private law theory, constitutional law, free speech, analytic and normative jurisprudence, and the intersections of law and technology. His previous work, exploring theories of tort liability for harms caused by emergent technologies, has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence and Osgoode Hall Law Journal.

Laura is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her research focuses on moments when the lines between sovereign territory and private property are imprecise, particularly in the history of US island territories. Her dissertation looks at the role of commercial interests in these territories and the ways in which these private interests have been critical in shaping new legal doctrines.

Her work is primarily engaged with history, but also explores contemporary interests, including how state power intersects with private property rights in eminent domain cases, the legal obligations of the US federal government to its territories, and the legal future of artificial islands. Laura holds an MA in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University, and prior to her doctoral studies worked as an educator in Qatar, Pittsburgh, and Honolulu.

I am a PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law, currently writing my dissertation on the practice and theory of statutory interpretation in the United States. I aim to both describe how statutes have been read historically and for what reasons, and provide a normative account of how they should be read that moves beyond the textualist-purposivist debate. My secondary area of research is in property, specifically the history of water law and environmental commodification in settler colonial contexts.

My work was awarded the American Bar Foundation’s Graduate Student Paper Award and has been published in Law and Social Inquiry and Journal of Palestine Studies. I was previously a fellow in the National Science Foundation’s Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century program, and have received numerous Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships.

Stav is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Private Law Theory. She holds a JSD degree from New York University School of Law, where she was a Fellow at the Information Law Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her research lies at the intersection of intellectual property and information privacy law, with a particular focus on propertization processes and the integration of social psychological theories into legal theory. Stav holds an LL.M. in Legal Theory from NYU and an undergraduate degree in law and psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to her graduate studies, she clerked in the Office of the Attorney General in Israel.

Will is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law researching social, political, and legal theories of work and its management. Will’s dissertation employs a critical historical account of the emergence and ongoing development of the science of management to reconstruct normative analysis of the legitimacy and appropriate legal regulation of workplace hierarchy, authority, and control. Special attention, here, is paid to the present and future of techniques and technologies of workplace management, as the workplace as we have known it dissipates, if not disappears. Prior to graduate work, Will co-founded and managed a worker-cooperative cafe and bar in Philadelphia, PA. 

Matt is a Ph.D. student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, and a J.D. candidate at NYU School of Law. He is focused on the study of law and globalization.

Matt researches the legal structure of the global economy, with a particular focus on international trade law and private law. He is also using the law to track how globalization reshaped perceptions of our obligations to people in different times and places. This work draws on a range of methodologies, including history, legal theory and political thought. With this research, Matt seeks to advance discussions about new ways to govern the global economy and structure the international order. 

Isabella Luisa Mariani is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley School of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program with a Designated Emphasis in Political Economy. She is a Doctoral Fellow with the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her research lies at the intersection of Law, Philosophy, and Political Economy. Her dissertation examines the attention economy, analyzing its effects on our autonomy and interpersonal relationships, the market power of technology companies, and potential regulatory and legal responses.

She holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, for which she received First Class Honors for her thesis entitled “Corruption and Justice: Restoring Institutional Integrity.” She is the recipient of the 2016 University of Auckland Faculty of Arts International Master’s Degree Scholarship. She holds a Joint Honors Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. Her work is funded by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

Daimeon Shanks-Dumont is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. An historian by training and temperament, his dissertation research focuses on the contested histories of sovereign equality and international hierarchy in international law, and the relationship between historical energy regimes, world economic systems, and inter-sovereign relations conceptualized through the framework of private contract law theory. He has published on a range of theoretical areas, including the self-funding structures of U.S. administrative agencies, the aesthetic dimensions of law and legal order, the early histories of international humanitarian law, international environmental law and the criminalization of ecocide, and other sundry topics.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Daimeon received a J.D. from the University of Colorado, where he earned certificates in International Law and Federal Indian Law. During law school, he worked as a legal assistant to the Chair of the United Nations’ International Law Commission in New York and Geneva, and helped represent the Maya indigenous people of Southern Belize before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Prior to his legal career, Daimeon spent over a decade in professional cycling, working Grand Tours, Classics, World Cups, World Championships, and the Olympics, and published a bicycle repair manual in 2012.

Daimeon plans to go on the law-teaching market in the fall of 2025, and hopes to teach administrative law, contract, property, Federal Indian law, international law and international human rights, energy and environmental law, jurisprudence and legal theory, and/or criminal law.