2018 Visiting Fellows

Daniela Alaattinoğlu is a PhD Candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her doctoral thesis is a socio-legal investigation of the establishment, abolition and remedy of involuntary sterilisation and castration, contextually comparing the realisation of state responsibility in Sweden, Norway and Finland. In the thesis, she traces legal and social change in the developing relationship between the notions of public and individual, drawing on legal mobilisation theory. Daniela is interested in and has published within the fields of human and constitutional rights; gender, sexuality and law; reparations; feminist legal theory; law and culture; constitutional law and criminal law. Her previous work experience includes teaching criminal law to Finnish police students and working as a legal researcher at a human rights NGO in Turkey. During her time as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in Constitutional Law in October and November 2018, Daniela will be polishing her thesis and discussing its comparative and theoretical arguments with her colleagues at the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies and Melbourne Law School.

Melissa is a Senior Lecturer at the Law Faculty, the University of New South Wales, Sydney.  Her research contributes to the field of Asian Legal Studies, with a focus on Comparative Constitutional Law; Law and Development; and Law and Religion. Her research has a particular focus on Southeast Asia, where she has conducted extensive socio-legal field research. She is currently sole Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Grant on "Constitutional Change in Authoritarian Regimes" (2018-2020). Melissa is the author of Law and Religion in Indonesia: Conflict and the Courts in West Java (Routledge, 2014). She is the editor of three major volumes on Myanmar: Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar (2014);  'Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging' (OUP 2016), and The Business of Transition: Law, Development and Economics in Myanmar (CUP 2017). She has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals and has a forthcoming article in the International Journal of Constitutional Law on Myanmar's Constitutional Tribunal (2018). She is currently working on a book manuscript on The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis. Melissa has been invited to work with many international and local organisations in Myanmar with a focus on constitutional and administrative law reforms, and legal education. She leads the UNSW Law Southeast Asia engagement strategy, and is the Myanmar Academic Lead for the UNSW Institute for Global Development. Melissa teaches in the areas of constitutional law, law and development, and Asian legal systems.

Mariyam is a DPhil Candidate in Law at the University of Oxford. She researches on the constitutional right to privacy in India under the supervision of Professor Paul Craig.

Mariyam’s MPhil thesis, also on the same topic, was cited with approval by the nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in KS Puttaswamy v Union of India AIR 2017 SC 4161. Her analysis of the judgment was recently published in the Indian Law Review.

Mariyam holds an undergraduate degree in law from Osmania University, Hyderabad (India). In 2012, she was the law clerk to the Chief Justice of India. Subsequently, she read for the BCL at Oxford as a Felix Scholar.

Mariyam also serves on the editorial board of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal and convenes the South Asian Law Discussion Group at the Oxford Law Faculty.

Jayani is completing her doctoral studies at Monash University. Her thesis addresses general questions of methodology in political philosophy. Prior to that, she received a BA(Hons)/LLB(Hons) from Monash University and an LLM with a focus on Legal Theory from New York University. Her research interests include constitutional law and theory, political philosophy and social theory. She is interested in the impact of these perspectives on law with a particular focus on institutional path-dependence and change (including constitutional change), political leadership and racial justice. She plans to focus on these areas during her time as Visiting Fellow in Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Melbourne. She has taught a wide range of subjects at Monash University including Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Trusts, Contract Law and Political Philosophy.

Elizabeth O’Loughlin is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester, where she has worked on a European Research Council-funded study entitled ‘A sociology of the transnational constitution’. She is a teaching assistant at the University of Leeds, where she teaches Constitutional and Administrative Law, Equity and Trusts, and Researching Law. From September 2018, she will be a Lecturer in Law at City Law School, University of London.

Elizabeth completed an LLM (by research) at the European University Institute and an LLB at the University of Leeds. She was previously a researcher at the University of Sheffield, working on a Nuffield Foundation research project (‘Exploring the Procedural Fairness of the Ombudsman’) with Dr Richard Kirkham, and has also worked at the Kenya Section of the International Commission of Jurists.

Her recent research has focussed upon the function of international law in constitutional reform in Kenya, empirical methods in English administrative law, and the function of judicial review of the UK ombudsector. From July-August 2018 she joins Melbourne Law School as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in Comparative Constitutional Law. During her visit, she will be working on a project exploring the role of courts in addressing land conflicts and injustices in East Africa.

Dr Bilyana Petkova joined the Department of International and European Law of Maastricht University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in September 2017. She is affiliated as a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Information Society Project since 2014. Before joining UM, Bilyana was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and at New York University where she was a part of the Jean Monnet Center and later, the NYU Information Law Institute. Her research interests are in comparative constitutional law, judicial legitimacy, federalism and human rights, with a recent focus on data-driven cities, US-EU privacy law and freedom of speech in a digital age. Her paper "The Safeguards of Privacy Federalism" won a Young Scholars Award at the Eight Privacy Law Scholars Conference in the University of Berkeley, California. Bilyana publishes in both US-based and European editions. Among others, her book chapters have appeared with Oxford and Cambridge University Press, and articles –  in the Lewis & Clark Law Review, the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property, the Common Market Law Review, the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON) and the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law. As a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in Melbourne, Bilyana will work on a forthcoming article examining the importance of free speech for the U.S. constitutional system as compared to the prominence of privacy in the European one

Francesca Raimondo is a PhD student in Legal Studies at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna where she is working on a project entitled “From identity to citizenship. The contemporary challenges of diversity. A comparative perspective”. She is a tutor for the classes of Diritto Pubblico Comparato e Comparative Constitutionalism at the University of Bologna, School of Law. Francesca graduated in Law in 2014 at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, her dissertation analysed the controversies concerning the Islamic headscarf in comparative perspective, examining the cases of UK, Canada and Italy. From April to December 2014 she was an intern at the Centre for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development (CCSDD) in Bologna. After the graduation, Francesca was awarded a scholarship from the School of Law of the University of Bologna for an in-depth research of her dissertation topic at the Osgoode Hall Law School - York University in Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin L. Berger. In 2016, she attended the Centre for Studies and Research at The Hague Academy of International Law on the theme of “Citizenship in International Law”, where she carried out research on the “Citizenship-Related Cases in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)”. Her recent research work has focused on the culturalization of citizenship in the naturalization path and on the draft reform of the Italian regulation on citizenship. From July-August 2018 she joins Melbourne Law School as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow in Comparative Constitutional Law. During her visit, she will be working on her doctoral thesis examining the development of the concept of belonging in citizenship regulation.

Dr. Dinesha Samararatne is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka where she teaches Administrative Law, Constitutional Law and Human Rights Law. Dinesha is a LLB graduate from the University of Colombo and an Attorney-at-Law. She read for her Master’s degree as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School, MA, USA and she completed her doctoral studies at the University of Colombo. Her recent research work has been in relation to judicial enforcement of economic and social rights, judicial interpretation of fundamental rights, war affected women with disability, the study of law from the perspectives of cultural studies and access to justice. Dinesha has previously held visiting positions at the Gilbert and Tobin Centre for Public Law, Faculty of Law of the University of New South Wales, UNSW and at the Institute for Human Rights, Abo Akademi, Turku, Finland. During her visit to the Centre on Comparative Constitutional Law, April – May 2018, as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow she will be working on a paper examining the current constitutional reform processes in Sri Lanka.elissa teaches in the areas of constitutional law, law and development, and Asian legal systems.

Surabhi Shukla is DPhil (law) student at the University of Oxford. She researches in the area of constitutional theory. Her DPhil attempts to propose a methodological approach to constitutional interpretation based on an exploration of the value system behind each provision. She has completed her B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) from the NLSIU, India and her LL.M. from UCLA, USA. She is admitted to the Bar in India and New York and she blogs on sexual orientation and gender identity cases in Indian courts, https://lawandsexuality.com/