Natalie Davidson joined the Law Faculty as Lecturer (assistant professor) in the Fall of 2017. She holds a joint LLB-Maîtrise (King's College London and Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne), LLM (University of London), and doctorate in law (Tel Aviv University). She was a research fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas School of Law, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University Jerusalem (Human Rights under Pressure Program). Prior to her doctoral studies, she practiced corporate and banking law in Tel Aviv.
Natalie combines legal, historical, and social scientific perspectives on international law, constitutional law, and private law to explore the ways law enables and constrains violence. Her book American Transitional Justice: Writing Cold War History in Human Rights Litigation revisits landmark torture cases filed in US courts in the 1970s and 1980s under the Alien Tort Statute, and shows that these cases functioned as an unspoken transitional justice mechanism for the US and its authoritarian allies (focusing on Paraguay and the Philippines) to transition out of the Cold War order. In her current research she explores the regulation of the arms trade, Israeli courts' uses of international human rights law, authoritarian legality and norm evolution in international law. Her research project How Domestic Violence Became Torture in International Human Rights Law: A Socio-Legal Inquiry is the recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant (no. 1938/19). Natalie also directs the team of Israel reporters for the Oxford Reports on International Law in Domestic Courts.
