Miller Fellows
Faculty: Professor Eric Stover
Miller Fellow: Ivey Dyson (8/12/20 to 12/18/20)
Project: International Aid Organizations and Information Sharing of Human Rights Violations for Legal Accountability: Obligations and Obstacles
Ivey Dyson is a 3L at Berkeley Law focusing on international human rights and refugee law. During her time in law school, she has served as a student researcher in the International Human Rights Law Clinic, and a student leader for the Berkeley Journal of International Law, International Human Rights Workshop, and International Refugee Assistance Project. Outside of school, Ivey has worked with the International Human Rights Workshop in Amman, Jordan. She was also chosen as a 2020 UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Fellow which funded her work with the Lebanese Center for Human Rights. Ivey is the recipient of the UC Berkeley 2020 Afaf Kanafani Prize for her paper entitled “Forgotten Women: How Human Rights, Health, and Protection Issues for Widowed and Divorced Migrant Women in the Middle East are Falling through the Cracks.”
For the Miller Fellowship, Ivey is working with Professor Eric Stover, Research Fellow Sarah Craggs, and three law students at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center researching the policies of international aid organizations (IAOs) regarding information sharing with legal bodies seeking to bring perpetrators to justice. IAOs provide assistance to migrants and refugees who are privy to information that could be of interest to legal bodies, such as national and international commissions of inquiry or courts, which are seeking legal accountability and justice. However, the role of IAOs in information sharing is still indeterminate. Ivey’s research will explore the legal, ethical, safety, and practical issues related to gathering and sharing such information. The research will include an extensive literature review and archival research. It will also include interviews with IAO staff members and with prosecutors and investigators within international commissions and tribunals, national war crimes units, and national courts.
Faculty: Professor Laurel E. Fletcher
Miller Fellow: David Maxson Harris (9/1/20 to 12/17/20)
Project: Reconsidering International Human Rights Praxis
David Maxson Harris is a 3L at Berkeley Law focusing on domestic human rights. As a student advocate in the International Human Rights Law Clinic, he has helped pass local legislation promoting border policies in accordance with human rights best practices and develop a truth, justice, and reconciliation commission to confront racialized police and prosecutor misconduct in San Francisco. David also represents LGBTQ+ asylum seekers as part of the California Asylum Representation Clinic and is a Senior Executive Editor of the California Law Review and a steering committee member of the Law and Political Economy Society. He previously interned at the Impact Fund and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, working on impact litigation ranging from gay conversion therapy to public benefits. Prior to law school, David was a litigation paralegal at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, working on pro bono matters involving the Muslim Ban, prisoners’ rights, police misconduct, and human trafficking. David attended Columbia University, where he majored in political science and linguistics and codirected the university’s Amnesty International chapter.
David Maxson Harris will work with Professor Laurel E. Fletcher at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law on a project that reconsiders international human rights praxis. International human rights came of age in a particular political context which shaped the international human rights imaginary. These foundational ideas and understandings about what international human rights meant and therefore how they should be advanced have continued to influence the international human rights movement and driven the rift within the movement. This research critically will examine the current debates about the future of human rights, and propose a new conceptualization of international praxis to address the current crisis.
Faculty: Professor Marci Hoffman
Miller Fellow: Luke Miller (9/16/20 to 12/18/20)
Project 1: International Legal Research in a Nutshell
Project 2: Foreign Law Guide
Luke Miller is a 3L at Berkeley Law focusing on international business law and general corporate litigation. During his time at Berkeley Law, Luke has been an article editor and submissions editor—and is currently the Senior Submissions Editor—for the Berkeley Journal of International Law and an article editor for the Berkeley Business Law Journal. Luke has completed coursework on various aspects of international law and international and foreign legal research, from which he developed a legal research guide on the topic of comparative sodomy laws in West African and South African nations. Luke is also a country editor for the Foreign Law Guide, a legal research database supported by Brill, where he contributed content for the Guinea page. Prior to law school, Luke was a paralegal at a boutique corporate law firm in Portland, Oregon, and a teaching assistant for a French government program on the French overseas department of La Réunion. Luke attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he majored in French Language and Literature and minored in History.
For the Miller Fellowship, Luke will be assisting Professor Hoffman with several research projects. The first is researching and editing the third edition of International Legal Research in a Nutshell. This book is used by law schools all over the country as the primary text for teaching international legal research. It is also used to supplement research in Advanced Legal Research seminars in many U.S. and international law schools. Professor Hoffman will also utilize Luke’s research skills and French language abilities to update foreign laws for a database called Foreign Law Guide, published by Brill. He will focus on French-speaking jurisdictions by researching and locating primary laws (codes, statutes) and secondary sources (commentary and analysis) to better support researching the laws of jurisdictions around the world.
Faculty: Professor David Oppenheimer
Miller Fellow: Clara Dorfman (9/16/20 to 12/18/20)
Project: Hijab in Europe
Clara Dorfman is a 2L at Berkeley Law interested in appellate advocacy, international human rights, and equal protection litigation. During her time at Berkeley she has been involved in the Workers Rights Clinic with Legal Aid At Work, the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law and Policy, Ecology Law Quarterly, and the Native American Law Students Association Repatriation Committee. She spent the summer after her first year in law school working in the civil appeals section of the Alaska attorney general’s office, focusing on issues regarding federal Indian law and environmental policy. Prior to law school Clara worked in the House of Representatives and for the 2016 Clinton campaign. She attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied moral philosophy and Italian literature.
Over the past two decades, beginning in France and spreading across Europe, laws have been enacted and policies adopted restricting Muslim girls and women from covering their heads and faces in various public places. These laws are sometimes justified as neutral promotions of secularism, or alternatively as necessary to promote equality and community, but the intent is usually clear — to restrict religious expression by a small intersectionality identified group. The two pan-European courts (the CJEU and ECtHR) have enabled these discriminatory policies when applied to Muslims, while restricting them when applied to Christians. This paper will examine the growth of these restrictions over the past few years, and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has had any impact on their enforcement. Clara Dorfman will work with Professor David Oppenheimer at the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality & Anti-Discrimination Law on a report on legal restrictions imposed on Muslim women who wear the Hijab and/or cover their faces in Europe, and how these restrictions have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Faculty: Professor David Grewal
Miller Fellow: Lawrence J. Liu (10/1/20 to 12/18/20)
Project: The globalization of laissez-faire theory in International Economic Law
Lawrence J. Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law, and a J.D. student at Yale Law School. He has research interests in administrative law, law and globalization, the legal profession, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. Lawrence’s work has been published in The China Quarterly and Law & Social Inquiry (both with Rachel E. Stern), as well as in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (with Sepehr Shahshahani). During law school, Lawrence was a member of the Housing Clinic, and he served as the Empirical Scholarship Editor for the Yale Law Journal, the Executive and Managing Editor for the Global Constitutionalism Seminar, a Submissions Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law, Co-Director of the Paul Tsai China Center Student Board, and Academics Committee Co-Chair of the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association. Lawrence spent the summer of 2020 working for Davis Polk & Wardwell, and he spent the summer of 2019 interning at a legal aid organization in Beijing. After law school, Lawrence will clerk for the Honorable Andrew D. Hurwitz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Originally from Plano, Texas, he holds a B.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and an M.A. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from Berkeley Law.
Lawrence J. Liu will help Professor David Singh Grewal with a project investigating the globalization of laissez-faire theory in international economic law, particularly international trade law. Studying GATT and WTO jurisprudence from the era of “embedded liberalism” to today’s globalized “neoliberalism,” the project will consider the regulation of domestic economies via trade treaty and consider critically the evolution of cross-border legality from mid-twentieth-century internationalism to what is sometimes now called “global governance.”