Dr. Natalie Davidson

Natalie Davidson is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and Vice-Dean for Teaching at the Buchmann Faculty of Law. 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 teaches and researches international human rights law, the legal regulation of the global arms trade, and constitutional law, combining legal, historical, and social scientific approaches. She is particularly interested in 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. Her research project How Domestic Violence Became Torture in International Human Rights Law: A Socio-Legal Inquiry was the recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant (no. 1938/19). In 2023 she began a new research project, also funded by the Israel Science Foundation, on The Roles of Law in Israeli Security Exports (no. 1217/23). Natalie also directs the team of Israel reporters for the Oxford Reports on International Law in Domestic Courts.

International Human Rights Law

Constitutional Law

Sociology and History of Human Rights

Legal regulation of arms trade

Transitional Justice

Education:

LLD, Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law (2016)

LLM, London School of Economics and Political Science (1999).

Joint LLB-Maîtrise, King's College London and Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1997)

Academic and Professional Experience:

Visiting Professor, Georgetown University Law Center Spring 2024

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), with tenure, Buchmann Faculty of Law Tel Aviv University 2022-present

Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Buchmann Faculty of Law Tel Aviv University 2017-2022

Postdoctoral Fellow, Minerva Center for Human Rights, Hebrew University Jerusalem Faculty of Law (Human Rights under Pressure) 2016-2017

Research Fellow, Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas Austin School of Law 2015-2016

Attorney, International Legal Division, Bank Leumi Israel 2006-2010

Associate Attorney, Corporate Department, Goldfarb Seligman (formerly Goldfarb Levy Eran & Co.) 2005-2006

Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan Ann Arbor 2002-2004

Trainee Attorney, Corporate Department, Goldfarb Seligman (formerly Goldfarb Levy Eran & Co.) 1999-2001

Languages

English and French: native languages; Hebrew: fluent; Spanish and Italian: advanced

Representative Publications:

Natalie R. Davidson, "American Transitional Justice: Writing Cold War History in Human Rights Litigation" (Cambridge University Press, Human Rights in History Series, 2020)

Natalie R. Davidson “The New Atrocity in International Law”, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law (forthcoming).

Tamar Hostovsky Brandes and Natalie Davidson, The European Convention on Human Rights in Israeli Courts, 20 European Constitutional Law Review 4 (2024).

Natalie R. Davidson and Tamar Hostovsky Brandes, Israeli Courts and the Paradox of International Human Rights Law, 33 European Journal of International Law 1243 (2022).

Natalie R. Davidson and Leora Bilsky, The Judicial Review of Legality, 72 University of Toronto Law Journal 403 (2022).

Natalie R. Davidson "Everyday Lawmaking in International Human Rights Law: Insights from the Inclusion of Domestic Violence in the Prohibition of Torture", 47 Law & Social Inquiry 205 (2022)

Leora Bilsky and Natalie R. Davidson, "Legal Ethics in Authoritarian Legality: A Response to David Luban," 34 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 665 (2021)

Natalie R. Davidson, “This is Not Who we Are: On the Representation of Israeli Society in the Judgments of Eliezer Rivlin” in Itzhak Amit, Aharon Barak, Sharon Zenzifer Helfman, Ariel Porat, and Guy Shani eds., The Eliezer Rivlin Book (forthcoming).

Natalie R. Davidson "Human Rights Realism", 54 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 31 (2021)

Natalie R. Davidson, "Process-Tracing the Meaning of International Human Rights Law" in Rossana Deplano and Nicholas Tsagourias eds., Handbook on Research Methods in International Law (Elgar, 2021), 229-244.

Natalie R. Davidson, "The Feminist Expansion of the Prohibition of Torture: Towards a Post-Liberal International Human Rights Law?" 25 Cornell International Law Journal 109 (2019)

Natalie R. Davidson, "Toward a Self-Reflexive Law? Narrating Torture's Legality in Human Rights Litigation" 21 Law, Text, Culture 100, 2017

Natalie R. Davidson “Alien Tort Statute Litigation and Transitional Justice: Bringing the Marcos Case back to the Philippines” 11 International Journal of Transitional Justice 257, 2017

Natalie R. Davidson “Shifting the Lenses on Alien Tort Statute Litigation: Narrating U.S. Hegemony in Filártiga and Marcos” 28 European Journal of International Law pp. 20-30, 2017

Natalie R. Davidson “From Political Repression to Torturer Impunity: The Narrowing of Filártiga v. Peña-Irala” Karen Engle, Zinaida Miller and D.M. Davis (ED), Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 255-287.

Full CV