The Hauser Global Law School Program will welcome a select group of scholars from around the world as Global Fellows for the 2026-2027 academic year. Below please find descriptions of 1L Reading Groups offered by some of our Global Fellows and excerpts from their biographies.  

Instructions for registration can be found on the “Registering for 1L Reading Groups” Docket post.

Fall 2026

1L Reading Group: Suing Multinational Corporations

How do you hold the world’s most powerful entities accountable when they operate beyond territorial boundaries? This reading group explores the high-stakes legal battles surrounding the struggle to make multinational corporations accountable for human rights and environmental harms, offering participants a thrilling tour of various fields of law. We will begin by exploring why international law has historically shielded corporations from human rights harms, creating a global regulatory void. We will then examine how creative lawyers have attempted to fill this void: first, through dramatic experimentation by using the U.S. Alien Tort Statute; second, by using Delaware corporate law to articulate duties one would ordinarily think are outside its bounds; and finally, through cutting-edge climate litigation in foreign courts. All of these attempts involve regulating harm that goes beyond the strict territorial limits of the regulating state. This reading group aims to equip 1Ls to critically evaluate both the geopolitical power wielded by global capital and the innovative legal tools used to challenge it. Readings will be short pieces (law review articles and book chapters) and a couple of cases (U.S. case law under the Alien Tort Statute and Dutch climate litigation in tort law).  

Instructor: Debadatta Bose

Debadatta Bose is Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at NYU School of Law whose work is prominent in the global discourse on corporate human rights responsibility. His current research focuses on private law and business law while also engaging with international law. The bulk of his scholarship investigates how law can be transformed from a tool of erasure of corporate human rights harms into one that empowers people as meaningful rightsholders.

1L Reading Group: Energy Justice and the Energy Transition

This reading group will explore “energy justice,” an emerging body of scholarship that examines how energy laws and policies distribute benefits and burdens, and how different communities and actors participate in energy decision-making. The transition to lower-emission energy sources poses significant challenges, including how to reduce emissions while addressing disparities in energy affordability. The group will consider how these issues are addressed in energy justice debates. The reading group will be structured around one main book, Darren McCauley’s Energy Justice: Re-Balancing the Trilemma of Security, Poverty and Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which will serve as the core text for the discussion. Alongside this core text, we will read a selection of complementary materials, including selected chapters from Benjamin K. Sovacool and Michael H. Dworkin’s Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles, and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2014), as well as academic articles such as Kirsten Jenkins et al.’s “Energy Justice: A Conceptual Review” (2016).

Instructor: Aldo Pardi

Aldo Pardi is a Postdoctoral Global Fellow affiliated with the Institute for Policy Integrity and a “Franco Bonelli” Scholar. His current research project critically examines how global regulation shapes EU and US regulatory approaches to energy storage systems, as well as the choice between public and private models for their management.

Spring 2027

1L Reading Group: The Robot at the Border: Asylum, Migration, and Mobility in the Datafication Era

Borders are sandboxes for broader societal change. This is why so much is projected onto them, and concentrated in them: to act on the border is to rehearse a change meant to take hold elsewhere. In the era of datafication – the rendering of ever more of social life into machine?readable data that can be stored, sorted, and acted upon – this experimental role is sharpened, and the border becomes a testing ground at once technological, legal, and political. Data collection of every kind, together with the increasing role of artificial intelligence, reshapes how movement is recorded and sorted. The legal implications cut across several branches of international law and bear on human dignity, accountability, and access to justice, while the political framings produced there seldom stay put, running underground and resurfacing elsewhere to redraw how asylum is reached, how migration becomes possible, and what rights attach to mobility. The questions all this raises – legal, ethical, and socio-technical – reach well beyond the border, and outrun the categories on which we usually rely. This reading group treats them as legal and social questions, and asks what it takes to study, and to act on, a border that increasingly works through and with data.  

Instructor: Alice Fill

Beginning in January 2027, Alice Fill will join the Institute for International Law and Justice as a Postdoctoral Global Fellow. Her research examines, through an infrastructural approach, how the digital identification turn is reshaping the relationship between citizenship and migration in West Africa. Focusing on the rollout of biometric identity systems, civil registry reforms, and interoperable databases, it asks how legal status becomes verifiable, actionable, and contestable through socio-technical infrastructures. Her work sits at the intersection of border studies, science and technology studies, and socio-legal scholarship, with a particular focus on the datafication of mobility and migration governance.

1L Reading Group: Inheritance and Testamentary Freedom across the Common Law World

Instructor: Ben Chen

Ben Chen is Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Law School. He is a law and economics scholar whose work spans equity, trusts, inheritance law, civil procedure, game theory, and behavioral economics. His current research centers on inheritance litigation and pensions as inheritance. This research draws on his information-theoretic and behavioral-economic modelling of ex-ante adjudication and litigation cost-shifting. It also draws on his empirical and doctrinal investigations into the inheritance implications of lifetime institutions and transactions.

1L Reading Group: At the Margins of the State: Criminal Governance, Policing, and the Production of Marginality

Legalistic perspectives on social life often treat the formal legal order as a baseline condition, while crime, corruption, informality, and extralegal force appear as deviations from it. But in many of the places where a significant share of the world’s population lives—the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the banlieues of Paris, the shantytowns of Buenos Aires—social order is constituted through unstable arrangements among legal state institutions, informal authorities, and sometimes criminal forms of governance. This reading group examines what happens to law, policing, and state authority in these marginal spaces. The state is not simply absent from them. It appears intermittently: as raids, surveillance, welfare offices, eviction courts, police patrols, informal deals, or sudden coercion. Criminal organizations may govern alongside the police rather than simply against them. Policing may operate through improvisation, discretion, and force more than through legal mandates. And formal legal institutions may not merely fail to remedy marginality, but actively help produce and reproduce it. The group asks what these spaces reveal about the relation between law and violence, state and crime, legality and informality. What becomes of rule-of-law assumptions when the state governs unevenly? How do criminal and legal authorities become entangled? How do police, courts, and administrative institutions create the very populations and territories they claim to regulate? Drawing on ethnographic and sociological research, the readings invite law students to think beyond the formal image of the state and toward the concrete practices through which legal order is made, suspended, and contested at the margins.  

Instructor: Matías Fernández

Matías Fernández (PhD, UCLA) is an ethnographer and political sociologist who studies policing organizations. His research examines how these institutions shape the subjectivities of state agents in morally challenging environments and, in turn, how this determines the exercise of state power in practice. He has pursued this agenda through extensive fieldwork with the Chilean police during a massive social uprising and legitimacy crisis, and he is beginning a new project on the social and moral world of prison guards in a context of rising criminal control of prisons.