Aslı Bâli

Professor Bâli is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights, and Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. She currently teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights, a seminar on the Laws of War and a Perspectives seminar on Third World Approaches to International Law.

During law school, she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Journal of International Law, and as an articles editor of the Yale Journal of Human Rights & Development. After law school, she worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, where she specialized in international transactions and sovereign representation. Bâli currently serves as co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch and as a national board member of the Middle East Studies Association. Immediately prior to her appointment at UCLA, Bâli served as the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow in Law at the Yale Law School.

Bâli’s principal scholarly interests lie in two areas: public international law—including human rights law and the law of the international security order—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. Her current research examines questions of constitutional design in religiously-divided societies. She has previously written on the nuclear non-proliferation regime, international legal arguments concerning humanitarian intervention, and the role of judicial independence in constitutional transitions.

Bâli’s recent scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of International Law Unbound, International Journal of Constitutional Law, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Cornell Journal of International Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Geopolitics, Studies in Law, Politics and Society and edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.

Bâli is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Cambridge where she was a Herschel Smith Scholar, Yale Law School and Princeton University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Politics.