Biography
Janka Deli examines how legal institutions shape economic behavior and how economic actors respond as those institutions change. Combining law and economics with empirical methods, she studies whether markets discipline rule of law decline or instead adapt to it, tracing responses across financial markets, corporate disclosure, and international trade. Her findings challenge the expectation that institutional decline reliably becomes economically costly: economic responses are often delayed, uneven, and fragmented, and markets frequently absorb institutional decline rather than constrain it. This work rests on an events-based approach that identifies institutional change through specific political, legislative, and judicial events rather than composite indices, and draws on original data from U.S. securities filings, rule of law-related investor-state arbitration in Europe, and institutional change in Hungary.
Janka is the Miller Empirical Fellow at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Nonresident Academic Fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School. She is an incoming Visiting Fellow at the Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity at the University of Chicago Law School.
Her scholarship has earned multiple awards, including the Theodore Eisenberg Poster Prize at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the Best Workshop Paper Prize from the International Law and Social Science Interest Group at the 2025 American Society of International Law Annual Meeting, and the 2025 Young Scholars Award from the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies. At Stanford, she received the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship (2021) and Gerald Gunther Prize (2019).
Janka’s research has been supported by the Miller Institute at Berkeley Law, the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford Data Science, Stanford University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, and László Sólyom, late President of Hungary’s Constitutional Court and President of Hungary, among others.
She earned JSD (2024) and JSM (2019) degrees from Stanford Law School, and a JD (summa cum laude) with a Certificate in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest (2017). At Stanford University, she previously held the Gerhard Casper Fellowship in Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (2023–2024) and was a Data Science Scholar at Stanford Data Science (2020–2023).
Publications
Silver Linings of the EU Migration Pact: Progressive Elements, Binding Solidarity, and Their Limits, in Contemporary Challenges of EU Asylum and Refugee Law and Policy (Goldner Lang & Silga eds., forthcoming 2027) (with Katerina Linos).
The Asymmetry Problem: Rule of Law Measurement, Political Risk, and the Misallocation of Capital, American Journal of International Law Unbound (forthcoming 2026).
Interviews as a Method for Rule of Law Measurement, American Journal of International Law Unbound (forthcoming 2026) (with Katerina Linos and Mark Pollack).
Filling the Void: The European Union’s Unique Position to Lead Climate Mobility Financing, 119 American Journal of International Law Unbound (2025).
Szerződések (Contracts), in Bevezetés a Jog Viselkedési Közgazdaságtani Elemzésébe (Introduction to Behavioral Law & Economics) 111–160 (Deli, Kemény & Tóth eds., 2020).
Works in Progress
Risk Factors and the Rule of Law: The Limits of Mandatory Disclosure (job market paper).
Investors Adapt: Diminishing Stock Market Response to Rule of Law Decline (available upon request).
Breaking Rules, Building Trade? Rule of Law Decline and Export Resilience in the European Union (available upon request).
Improving Rule of Law Impact Studies: A New, Events-Based Approach (available upon request).
Bankrolling Backsliding: The European Union’s Authoritarian Equilibrium in Hungary.
Other Publications
Silver Linings: Progressive Elements of the EU Migration Pact and Their Limits, VerfassungsBlog, (Jul. 21, 2026) (with Katerina Linos) (blog post).
Rule of Law Backsliding May Not Hurt Trade—And Why That’s a Problem, ProMarket (Mar. 31, 2026) (blog post).
Teaching Interests
Contracts, Business Associations, International Business Transactions, Securities Regulation, International Economic Law, Global Financial Regulation, Privacy Law, European Union Law, Public International Law, Empirical Methods for Lawyers, Statistical Inference in Law.
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
Contact
Email: janka.deli@berkeley.edu
By appointment:
312 Berkeley Law West
2680 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720-7200