Postdoctoral Fellows

Recent Articles

Repurposing Title IX: How Sexual Harassment Became Sex Discrimination in American Higher Education  In this historical analysis, Reynolds explains how sexual harassment first became unlawful sex discrimination in education under Title IX.

The diffusion of federal Title IX complaints throughout U.S. colleges and universities, 1994–2014  - This article uses an original dataset of all federal Title IX complaints filed against four year and above colleges and universities to investigate whether and how this form of legal mobilization has spread throughout higher education. 

MAY 5, 2023
Friday at Noon
Gender Institute Speaker

"Repurposing Title IX: How Sexual Harassment Became Sex Discrimination In American Higher Education"
Abstract: Addressing discrimination based on certain identities, such as race or gender, is a major concern for American colleges and universities. In 2011, the Department of Education clarified that sexual harassment is a form of discrimination that schools must eliminate under Title IX, the 1972 U.S. civil rights law that guarantees the right to equal educational opportunity regardless of sex. Colleges and universities now spend millions to manage sexual harassment through specialized bureaucracies often spread over multiple offices with upward of 50 employees. Yet Title IX was not originally intended to address sexual harassment in schools. The term “sexual harassment” did not even exist at the law’s inception. In this talk, Reynolds uses the case of Title IX to understand the specific pathways through which the meaning of existing laws can change over time while the text of those laws remains the same. Triangulating multiple data sources across linked case studies of three universities, Reynolds argues that the mutual interpenetration of social networks across the educational and legal domains stimulated the shift, which exemplifies a more general process that she calls the endogenous repurposing of law. This concept clarifies how people within the organizations regulated by law not only creatively define the meaning of legal compliance: they also introduce innovative interpretations of law that stimulate broader cultural changes in norms of behavior and material shifts in the balance of rights and powers in society at large.

Bio: Celene Reynolds studies gender inequality in organizations and the laws designed to reduce it. Her current work focuses on Title IX, the US civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. As a fellow at The Baldy Center, she will complete her book (under contract with Princeton University Press). It documents how and explains why sexual harassment became a form of unlawful sex discrimination under Title IX. She will also make progress on a new project that examines experiences of and institutional responses to sex discrimination in the American academy. Using an original dataset based on letters from the US Department of Education to colleges and universities that have allegedly violated Title IX, the project will illuminate a common - but often veiled - mechanism of inequality.

Before joining The Baldy Center, Reynolds was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Sociology from Yale University in 2019. Her award-winning research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Organization, Qualitative Sociology, Social Problems, and Socius. She has also received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy.

MARCH 10, 2023
509 O’Brian Hall, North Campus
Reception at Noon;
Seminar at 12:30 pm

This Hybrid Event is held in-person and via Zoom.

Tian Xu, Post Doctoral Fellow at The Baldy Center, earned his PhD in History from the Catholic University of America in 2021 and works on race, law, and social policy in post-Civil War America. His book project, tentatively titled Navigating Worthiness in America, compares white attorneys’ work in two strands of negotiations between federal authorities and their minority subjects: the distribution of military pensions to African Americans, and the admission of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Both welfare distribution and immigration admission hinged on the state’s adjudication of minority virtues and construction of civic ideals. In everyday life and often outside the courtrooms, the lawyers’ work served as a nexus of racialized administrative practices, interracial legal actions, creative uses of whiteness, and searches for equality.

Drawing from government and private collections in America and China, Xu’s research also sheds new light on the history of the legal profession. It recovers many lawyers’ unintended involvement in civil liberties while investigating the heavily racialized marketplace of interracial legal services. His work seeks to historicize both minority agency and white privilege in an age of pervasive racism and inequality. At The Baldy Center, Xu plans to develop and revise his book project through the lens of legal training and critical legal studies.

SEMINAR, MARCH 10, 2023
Brokering Migration, Brokering Change: The Strange Career of Chinese American Immigration Lawyers, 1907-1948.
Abstract: How did unjust laws create new marketplaces for the legal profession? What kind of lawyers would help Chinese immigrants in a time of institutional anti-Asian racism? Where did the early Chinese American lawyers strike the balance between business and activism? In what ways did immigration law practice shape the ethnicization and citizenship of the "impossible subjects"? This talk provides some evidenced answers to these questions. Specifically, it offers a historian's takeaway from the archives in California and Massachusetts, where he researched recently declassified primary sources about several Euro-American and Chinese American immigration lawyers' work in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sarah Ludin, 2019-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow, earned her Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She is a socio-legal historian of the early modern German-speaking lands, with a special interest in law and religion, secularity and secularism, legal phenomenology and difference, and law and language. Her dissertation, “The Reformation Suits: Litigation as Constitution-Making in a German Imperial Court, 1521-1555” reconsiders the role of civil litigation in the early Reformation in Germany, long regarded as an instance of the instrumentalization of law by “old-faith” authorities against the Protestants. Sara’s research shows how experimental uses of mundane, formulaic legal instruments of Roman law civil procedure fused with the legal culture and legal pluralism of the German lands, such that the litigation context became an unexpected proxy for the most pressing constitutional questions of the early Reformation. 

Ludin will use her time at The Baldy Center to revise her dissertation into a book manuscript, to complete a journal article based on material from her dissertation, and to begin to develop her next research project.

Daniel Platt, Baldy Center Postdoctoral Fellow 2018-2020, earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University. His research considers the history of capitalism in the United States, asking how commodities are created by the law and how race and gender ideologies shape such fabrications, particularly when they implicate the integrity of labor and the home. These concerns lie at the heart of his current manuscript, The Debt Question in Modern America, under contract with University of Chicago Press. The study examines how a diverse galley of Gilded Age and Progressive Era Americans, including freedpeople, feminists, and social reformers, debated what could be pledged in the financial marketplace and what should be forbidden. As these figures wrestled over the morality of mortgaging land, home goods, and labor power, all under the long shadow of slave emancipation, they confronted rivalrous notions of the economic freedoms understood to be most natural to men and women, black people and white. The Debt Question in Modern America traces how deeply conservative visions of social hierarchy were summoned to legitimize an expanding realm of financial exchange. Further, it shows how such hierarchies were nourished in stride by a new discourse of financial risk.

Portions of this research have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of American History and History of the Present. A paper, entitled “The Problem of Peonage,” was shared at The Baldy Center in March 2019. 

Following his term at The Baldy Center, Platt was appointed assistant professor, University of Illinois Springfield, Legal Studies.

Hughett's paper, "'A Hazardous Enterprise': Prisoners' Rights Lawyers' Quest for Justice Beyond the Courtroom"
was presented at The Baldy Center on November 10, 2017.

Amanda Hughett,  2017-19 Postdoctoral Fellow, was previously a Law and Social Sciences Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Earning a Ph.D. in History at Duke University, August 2017, her dissertation documents how civil liberties lawyers’ efforts to secure procedural protections for inmates during the 1970s unintentionally undermined imprisoned activists’ ability to organize and to secure more substantive victories. It begins by tracing the emergence of a surprisingly successful interracial movement to unionize incarcerated workers in North Carolina and across the nation. The project then reveals how prison administrators who at first opposed procedural protections for inmates used them, once created, to defeat prisoners’ more sweeping demands by portraying their institutions as modern bureaucracies that complied with the rule of law.

In so doing, Hughett's work illuminates the limitations of individual rights claims in the postwar era while helping to explain why American prisons continue to punish more harshly than their counterparts in any Western country. At the Baldy Center, Amanda will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively titled Silencing the Cell Block: The Making of Modern Prison Policy in North Carolina and the Nation.

Following her term at TRhe Center, Hughett was appointed assistant professor, University of Illinois Springfield, Legal Studies.

McNamee's paper, "Capital Sentencing and Fundamental Law: A Participatory Case Against Death Qualification," was presented at The Baldy Center, November 17, 2017.

David McNamee, 2017-19 Postdoctoral Fellow, earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. David's work, entitled “The Citizens' Constitution," argues for citizens' responsibility to directly participate in constitutional interpretation in certain roles—as voters and jurors, litigants and disobedients, partisans and deliberators. This theory sheds new light on the old idea of the Constitution as fundamental law. The Constitution’s basic principles are beyond the power of institutions to alter, are accessible to citizens’ common reason, and ground our disagreements while inviting ongoing interpretive debate.

By participating in this ongoing interpretive argument, citizens bring their fundamental law closer into alignment with the ideal of law that is self-given. This line of inquiry suggests institutional reforms to better realize these values of interpretive participation, such as juries' power to find fundamental law as well as a responsibility to give reasons for their decisions. At The Baldy Center, David aimed to develop this project as both a book manuscript and in several articles spelling out its institutional and doctrinal implications.

McNamee currently is clerking for Justice Sharon Lee on the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Camilo Arturo Leslie, 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow, has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan, where he previously earned a JD. His dissertation research combines legal sociology, economic sociology, and a theoretical focus on trust and trustworthiness to account for the ruinous “success” of history’s second largest Ponzi scheme: the $5.5 billion Stanford Financial Group fraud. Based on varied documentary data and more than 100 interviews with defrauded investors and former Stanford employees, this work traces the trajectory of the fraud in its two largest markets: the U.S. and Venezuela.

The work makes two claims. First, that a given actor’s “trustworthiness” is in fact a collaboratively produced appearance, an aggregate of all the positive and negative evaluative statements in circulation about that actor. Second, that this traffic in evaluative claims, or “worth claims,” obeys a “jurisdictional” logic. Camilo will use his time at The Baldy Center to revise his dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively titled Untangling the Knotted Roots of Trust: Trustworthiness and Jurisdiction in the Stanford Financial Group fraud. In addition, he will develop several journal articles both directly and indirectly related to his dissertation. In previous research, Camilo studied the power of map imagery to shape how subjects conceive of and experience their political communities. A paper from that project has been conditionally accepted at Theory & Society.

Camilo is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Rebecca Schmidt, 2015-16 TBGI Postdoctoral Fellow, holds a PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and has been a visiting fellow at the GlobalTrust Project at Tel Aviv University. Before starting her doctoral dissertation she studied law at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and obtained an LLM in International and Legal Studies from New York University. In her research Rebecca examines a key feature of globalization, the rise of regulation beyond the state. She particularly focuses on the emergence of transnational regulatory cooperation between public and private actors.

At The Baldy Center she participated in the Transnational Governance Interaction Network Project. Her main research focuses on the interplay between expertise driven private regulation and more traditional political authority in multi-level transnational regulatory networks. The argument tested is that within these networks existing public policy requirements and parameters defining legitimate forms of regulation are renegotiated. Rebecca’s fellowship is co-sponsored with York University. She spent Fall 2015 at the Baldy Center and Spring and Summer 2016 at York University (Canada).

Following her term at the Center, Rebecca was appointed Fellow in EU Regulation and Governance at University College Dublin, Ireland. As of 2020, Schmidt is serving as assistant professor, Dublin City University Law School.

Justin L. Simard, 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow, earned his JD and his PhD in History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation examines how American lawyers in the 19th century helped build the American economy. Using day books, ledgers, and letters, the dissertation provides a bottom-up history of an elite profession. These sources demonstrate that lawyers contributed to the growth and expansion of American capitalism not with grand gestures, but by solving day-to-day problems on behalf of their clients. By collecting debts, managing property sales, and drafting contracts, lawyers regulated the market, organized life on the American frontier, and facilitated the growth of complex commercial transactions.

At The Baldy Center, Justin continued his research on the work of 19th century American lawyers and published "The Birth of a Legal Economy: Lawyers and the Development of American Commerce," which appeared in the Buffalo Law Review. Justin also explored the ramifications of his work for modern legal professionals, beginning a project that analyzes the continued citation of slave cases by American judges and lawyers. 

Following his term at the Center, Justin served as visiting assistant professor at the Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon. As of 2020, Simard is assistant professor at Michigan State Univeristy Law School.

Laura R. Ford, 2014-16 Postdoctoral Fellow, received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University, having previously earned an LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law and Policy from University of Washington Law School and a J.D. from Tulane Law School.  Before beginning her study at University of Washington, Laura worked as a bond lawyer for The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.  Her recent publications include articles in Qualitative Sociology; Max Weber Studies; Theory & Society; and the Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal.   Forthcoming publications include a chapter on “Law and the Development of Capitalism” for The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber (currently available in an online edition).  Laura's book manuscript, The Intellectual Property of Nations: Historical and Sociological Perspectives on a Modern Legal Institution, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Laura is an assistant professor of Sociology at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.

Yun-Ru Chen, 2014-15 Postdoctoral Fellow, is a professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan), where she teaches Comparative Family Law and East Asian Laws.  After receiving a Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) from Harvard Law School (HLS), she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy in SUNY Buffalo Law School in addition to a research fellowship in the Institute for Global Law and Policy at HLS. 

Taking colonial Taiwan, a former territory of imperial China and the first colony of Japan, as the vantage point, her SJD dissertation suggests that ideas about nations and families were far from homogenous in the colonial encounter. She argues that it is not necessary that family law should play a reactionary role in developing nationalism in non-western societies. She is turning her dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Paradoxes of the National Family Law in (Post-) Colonial East Asia: Taiwan as the Nexus.”

She also worked as an intern associate at Yuan-Cheng LLP (Taipei) and served as a research expert for the National Museum of Taiwan History and for the Judicial Yuan, the highest judicial organ in Taiwan. Her publications include: “Family Law as a Repository of Volksgeist: The Germany-Japan Genealogy” (Comparative Law Review, 2013), “‘Rule of Law’ as an Anti-Colonial Discourse: Taiwanese Liberal Nationalists” (Law Text Culture, 2015); “Family Law in Action: The Transformation of Adultery and its Law in Modern Taiwan” (Book chapter in ASIAN COMPARATIVE FAMILY LAW. Kyoto University Press. Forthcoming 2016); and “Family Law in Taiwan: Historical Legacies and Current Issues” (Family Law in a Global Society (Brill Publishing, Leiden), forthcoming 2017.

Yun Ru is an Assistant Professor of Law at National Taiwan University.

Natasha Tusikov, 2014-15 Postdoctoral Fellow, received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Regulatory Institutions Network at the Australian National University. Her dissertation is a socio-legal analysis of the transnational private regulation of intellectual property on the Internet that is based on fieldwork undertaken in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This research examines the power of corporate actors to shape norms toward and the use of particular technologies, and control over essential Internet services, such as search engines and payment providers. 

Following her research fellowship at The Baldy Center, she became Assistant Professor of Sociology at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.  Her research interests focus upon transnational private governance and the emergent sociolegal dynamics that are shaped by the intersections of regulation, technology, and society.

While at The Baldy Center, she examined how technology firms, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, are shaping global standards relating to mass Internet surveillance and digital privacy. In particular, she examined the tensions and inter-dependencies between corporate and state Internet surveillance programs as revealed by Edward Snowden’s disclosure of classified files relating to the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. Natasha also holds degrees in English Literature from the University of British Columbia (BA) and Queen’s University (MA). Prior to undertaking her dissertation, she worked as a researcher with the Canadian federal government in the areas of cybercrime, money laundering, fraud and transnational crime.

Bio (as of Fall 2019): Natasha Tusikov is an assistant professor in the Criminology Program within the Department of Social Science at York University in Toronto, and a visiting research fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Her research examines the intersection among law, crime, technology, and regulation, with a particular focus on informal regulation by internet intermediaries. She is the principal investigator of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019-2021) entitled “Governing Knowledge and Data in Smart Cities” that investigates the central role that the control of data plays in smart cities. Dr. Tusikov is the author of Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet (University of California Press, 2017) and a co-editor of Information, Technology and Control in a Changing World Understanding Power Structures in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Before obtaining her PhD at the Australian National University, she was a strategic criminal intelligence analyst and researcher at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottawa.

Jesse J. Norris, 2013-15 Postdoctoral Fellow, earned his PhD in sociology and his JD at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His dissertation examined innovative forms of governance in European anti-poverty policy, based on case studies in Ireland and Portugal. After graduating from law school, Jesse served as a visiting professor at Beloit College and worked as a staff attorney for four trial court judges. Jesse’s research at the Baldy Center employed qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate alleged cases of entrapment in domestic terrorism prosecutions.

Building on the work he began while at The Baldy Center, Jesse has published seven articles so far on entrapment in terrorism sting operations, and a book chapter on the topic is also forthcoming. This line of research has documented and explained the apparent prevalence of entrapment in terrorism investigations since 9/11, analyzed how these entrapment claims have fared in court, revealed the temporal trends in entrapment in terrorism cases since the 1990s, and demonstrated the racial and ethnic disparities in these cases. His other publications have analyzed, among other things, the treatment of right-wing terrorism in federal terrorism law, judicial sentence modification doctrines, and state commissions to ameliorate racial disparities in criminal justice.

As of Fall 2019, Norris serves as assistant professor of Criminal Justice, SUNY Fredonia.

Or Bassok, 2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellow, completed his Doctorate of the Science of Law (JSD) at Yale Law School in 2013. His recent articles examine the relations between the sociological legitimacy of the American Supreme Court and its normative legitimacy; the effect of the rise of public opinion polls on the Court’s legitimacy; different social imaginaries and their influence on legal expertise; originalism as a method of esoteric writing; the American constitutional identity and the effects of media coverage on the legitimacy of national high courts.

As a Tikvah Scholar at New York University School of Law during the 2012-13 academic year, he examined the prospects of developing a constitutional identity for Israel. At Yale, he was a Fulbright scholar and a Robina Foundation Visiting Human Rights Fellow (2011-12). Before going to Yale and after completing his law degrees at the Hebrew University, he served as a defense attorney in the Israeli Defense Forces where he defended soldiers before military courts and the Israeli Supreme Court. His last case before the Israeli Supreme Court dealt with the evidentiary meaning of defendant’s failure to testify in trial (Milstein v. Chief Military Prosecutor). As an Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Fellow at The Baldy Center, he investigated the role of low politics in constitutional thinking.

Or recently joined the law faculty at Nottingham University, ranked sixth in the United Kingdom.

Anna Su, 2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellow, is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy in SUNY Buffalo Law School in addition to a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She also served as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and consulted for the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Her book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press. She holds an S.J.D (2013) from Harvard Law School, and received her J.D. and A.B. degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

Anna is currently an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Toronto.

Kaja Tretjak, 2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellow, is presently Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Johnson State College, where she established and directs the new program in criminal justice, focused on community and restorative justice. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Columbia University. Her academic interests include political ecology; gender, sexuality and feminist studies; social movements; and the interrelations between law and social change. As a Baldy fellow, Kaja published a peer-reviewed article on the significance of studying the political right.

Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Kaja is a frequent speaker on socio-political issues and grassroots organizing and strategy. She is co-founder of three nonprofit organizations, including Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER), which focuses on empowering students to reform how universities handle sexual assault. SAFER is the original inspiration for the current wave of “red tape” demonstrations sweeping campuses nationwide. Kaja also co-founded Hollaback!, today an international movement to end street harassment, and the Peaceful Streets Project, a police accountability effort in Austin, Texas.

Kaja is currently assistant professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at Johnson State College, Vermont, where she teaches anthropology and sociology and directs JSC’s new program in criminal justice/justice studies.

Mireille Abelin, 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellow, completed her PhD in anthropology at Columbia Uni­versity in 2012. Her dissertation examined the emergence of a political discourse of "fiscal sovereignty" (soberania fiscal) after Argentina's sovereign debt default of 2001, as well as the state's efforts to stabilize notions of value and reconstitute citizens as taxpayers and users of national currency. As an Interdisciplinary Legal Studies Fellow at The Baldy Center, she pursued a comparative project on perceptions of selfhood, sovereignty, and money as they crystallize in anti-tax movements in the United States and Argentina (both of which intensified in 2008).

Her research examines the paradox of why, in the aftermath of fiscal crises caused by financial deregulation, a discourse celebrating unfettered markets, individual rights, and limited government has continued to hold tremendous appeal in both countries. Bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on the study of fiscal relations in modern state contexts, she is analyzing popular and scholarly notions of economic obligation, examining narrative constructions of where gratitude and recognition for economic prosperity is directed. She is particularly interested in the dearth of attention accorded to the problem of economic obligation in Anglo-American theories of citizenship, and is exploring the circumstances under which rights-based citizenship paradigms have become divorced from fiscally mediated visions of political community. As of fall 2013, Mireille is a visiting instructor at the New School for Social Research in New York, New York. As of spring 2014, Mireille is a visiting scholar at New York University's Institute for Public Knowledge. She is also an instructor at the New School's Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA).

Author: Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism after the Arab Spring (Oxford, 2018)
Winner of the 2018 ICON-S Book Prize and the Society of Legal Scholars' Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2018

Nimer Sultany, 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellow, is Lecturer in Public Law, School of Law, SOAS, University of London. Previously, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Buffalo Law School (2012-2013). He holds an SJD from Harvard Law School; an LL.M. from University of Virginia; an LL.M. from Tel Aviv University; and an LL.B. from the College of Management. He practiced human rights law in Israel/Palestine, and was the director of the Political Monitoring Project at Mada al-Carmel—The Arab Research Center for Applied Social Research.

His publications include: “The State of Progressive Constitutional Theory: The Paradox of Constitutional Democracy and the Project of Political Justification” in the Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review; “Against Conceptualism: Islamic Law, Democracy, and Constitutionalism in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring” in the Boston University International Law Journal; “Activism and Legitimation in Israel's Jurisprudence of Occupation” in Social & Legal Studies; “Redrawing the Boundaries of Citizenship: Israel’s New Hegemony” in the Journal of Palestine Studies; and Citizens without Citizenship: Israel and the Palestinian Minority (Mada, 2003). His op-eds appeared in Arabic, Hebrew, and English in numerous media outlets, including: The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The Guardian, Buffalo News, Haaretz, and Al-Quds al-Arabi.

Nimer is currently Senior Lecturer in Public Law in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Julia Tomassetti, 2012-13 Postdoctoral Fellow, is an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong School of Law. She earned a JD from Harvard and a Sociology PhD from UCLA, where she worked under the mentorship of Distinguished Professor Maurice Zeitlin. She has also been a fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center and Center for Law, Society, & Culture at the Maurer School of Law. Before entering the academy, Tomassetti practiced campaign finance and employment law in New York City.  

Tomassetti’s research integrates work law, economic sociology, and political economy. Much of her work focuses on disputes over the legal identity of work relationships, including how perceptions of the business enterprise, contract and property rights, and new technologies shape legal interpretations of work. Tomassetti uses interdisciplinary methods to discover patterns and answer questions that doctrinal approaches alone cannot. Using this interdisciplinary lens, her scholarship has examined technology and work, non-market work, service work, and the gig economy. Her work has revealed that doctrinal puzzles often reflect and obscure political quandaries about the organization of contemporary capitalism.

Her current projects examine algorithmic management, neoliberalism in legal interpretations of precarious work, and the ambiguity between employer authority and property rights. She is also exploring FedEx’s decades-long experimentation with the legal distinction between employment and independent contracting, including how it may have prefigured and conditioned the practices and rhetoric of digital platforms.

Tomassetti teaches employment law, legal methods, consumer law, and environmental law.