Lawyer and academic with experience in public international law, dispute resolution, employment law, and data protection law (CIPP/E). Counsel at Hadef & Partners in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in the Regulatory and Government Advisory Practice Group. Former legal officer with the United Nations in New York and the Middle East. Previously taught at New York University School of Law and McGeorge School of Law. Teaching experience includes public international law, law of international organisations, international labour law, statutory interpretation, and administrative law. Research interests include labour law, international investment law, digital privacy and data protection, and the laws of war. Doctoral candidate at Yale Law School.

Curriculum Vitae


Education

  • JSD, Yale Law School, expected 2026

  • LLM, Yale Law School, 2020

  • LLM, international law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2020

  • JD, University of Notre Dame Law School, 2006

  • BA, philosophy and classics, George Washington University, 2003

Admissions

  • California, United States

  • Illinois, United States

  • England & Wales (solicitor)

Experience

  • Counsel, Regulatory & Government Advisory, Hadef & Partners (current)

  • Visiting professor of law, McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific, 2024-25

  • Acting assistant professor, New York University School of Law, 2023-24

  • Legal officer–international law, United Nations (UNRWA), 2022-23

  • Legal officer, United Nations (Secretariat), 2020-22

  • Legal officer, United Nations (UNRWA), 2015-19

  • Legal adviser, United Nations (UNDP), 2013-14

  • Associate attorney, Ballard Rosenberg Golper & Savitt LLP, 2010-12

  • Associate attorney, Dowd Bloch & Bennett LLP, 2009-10

  • Associate attorney, Gilbert & Sackman, 2007-09

REcent Publications

Law journal articles & book chapters

Shorter works

Forthcoming

  • Wage Labour & Foreign Capital

    Responsible business conduct in foreign investment encompasses compliance with internationally recognised standards in human rights, indigenous rights, environmental protection, and labour law. While the treatment of human rights, indigenous rights and environmental protection in investment law has generated considerable scholarship, the relationship between investment law and organised labour has not. This article considers investment law’s encounters with collective labour activity. It analyses investment cases in which investors allege that the host state violated its investment treaty obligations of fair and equitable treatment (FET) and full protection and security (FPS) through its intervention or non-intervention in trade union organising, collective bargaining, strikes, boycotts, and other industrial action. It shows that investment tribunals largely evaluate collective labour activity ex aequo et bono instead of looking to collective labour law for a rule of decision. Freed from any methodological control, these tribunals rely on intuitive, culturally-informed notions of normal and abnormal, legitimate and illegitimate, order and disorder.


    The article also explains why investment law cannot substitute for collective labour law the threadbare version of freedom of association in the modern, business-friendly version of human rights law. In that order, the procedural, communitarian principles that create the conditions for trade unionism and industrial democracy are devalorised and subordinated to property and entrepreneurial rights, the speech and associational rights of corporations and union objectors, and a concept of non-discrimination directed towards equal competition for prosperity.


    It proposes as a corrective a lex laboris mercatoria: five principles for systematising how investment tribunals conceptualise collective labour activity and evaluate the attendant state conduct.


    The Article takes its title from Marx, but one need not be a Marxist to see growing income and wealth inequality as the defining economic challenge of our era, one in which industrial action will become more prevalent and more militant. Assuming investment law survives in something resembling its current form–and that will require new systems of control in the adjudication of investment disputes–it should anticipate more encounters with organised labour and more collective labour activity. The lex laboris mercatoria is a system of control for those encounters.

Teaching

International law

United States law

Recent SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

  • The Temporal Limits of Armed Conflict: Indefinite NIACs, Forever Wars, and Prolonged Occupation, panel, American Society of International Law annual meeting, Washington, DC, April 2025

  • The 2024 ICJ Advisory Opinion, panel, University of Maryland, Carey School of Law, Baltimore, Maryland, April 2025

  • An International Law Perspective on Palestine, panel, Duke University School of Law, Durham, North Carolina, April 2025

  • Inviolability and War, American Association of Law Schools annual conference, San Francisco, California, January 2025

  • Palestine’s Land and Its Fate: Post-U.S. Election Perspectives, panel, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, November 2024

  • From Crémieux to Gerezim: Performative and constitutive citizenship, Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, virtual, October 2024

  • The International Court of Justice on Occupation and Self-Determination, panel, New York University School of Law, New York, New York, October 2024

  • Inviolability and War, American Society of International Law international criminal law section conference, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, June 2024

  • Demystifying UNRWA, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2024