The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law

Menu

Aslı Ü. Bâli

Promise Institute Inaugural Faculty Director
Distinguished Research Affiliate

The inaugural Faculty Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and also previously Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, Aslı Bâli currently teaches Public International Law, International Human Rights, a seminar on the Laws of War, a Perspectives seminar on Third World Approaches to International Law and a Law through Scholarship seminar on Methods and Theories of International and Comparative Law.

Bâli currently serves as co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch and as chair of the Task Force on Civil and Human Rights for the Middle East Studies Association. She has also been a visiting professor at Yale Law School and at Columbia Law School.

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. 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’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 federalism and decentralization for the purposes of addressing self-determination demands and governance goals in the transitions currently underway in the Middle East. She is also completing a project examining the post-Cold War erosion of the United Nations Charter prohibition on the use of force.

She has previously written on constitutional design in religiously divided societies, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, international legal arguments concerning humanitarian intervention, race and empire in the formation, interpretation and enforcement of international law, 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, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Cornell Journal of International Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Vanderbilt Journal and Transnational Law, Law and Social Inquiry, Geopolitics, Studies in Law, Politics and Society and book chapters in volumes published by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Elgar Press. She is co-editor of Constitution Writing, Religion and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Federalism and Decentralization in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2022).