The S.J.D. program at Georgetown Law allows outstanding students from around the world to engage in original and diverse academic scholarship. Students are supervised by Georgetown faculty who are among the leading scholars in their fields. The following are profiles of some of our current S.J.D. students.
Ammar Aljaser
LL.C.M., University of Pennsylvania
LL.M. University of Pennsylvania
LL.B. King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
The focus of Ammar's research is on the nascent insurance law of Saudi Arabia with a particular emphasis on Islamic finance's impact on its development, giving rise to the Sharia-based insurance mechanism known as "Takaful." Ammar is working under the supervision of Professor Kathryn Zeiler.
Hung-Ju Chen
LL.M. University of Illinois College of Law
LL.M. National Taiwan University College of Law, Taiwan
LL.B. Shin Hsin University College of Law, Taiwan
Hung-Ju’s supervisor is Professor Lawrence Solum, a noted expert on constitutional law and legal philosophy. His dissertation is a philosophical reflection on the duty to obey the law and civil disobedience in a transitional society. This topic was inspired by his observation of Taiwan’s political and legal transformation of the past fifty years.
Before coming to the United States, Hung-Ju was a lecturer on constitutional law and jurisprudence at Shin Hsin University. He was also a social activist, joined the peace movement, initiated the first referendum on Taiwan’s weapon purchase policy, coordinated several international symposia, and participated in the social movement against the death penalty. He is currently an academic consultant to Congress Citizen Watch – a Taiwanese legislative watchdog, for which he provides opinions on legislative policy.
By combining his experience with social activism with theory, Hung-Ju believes that his research will contribute to a better understanding of legitimate limitations on public authority and help to better define the constitutional meaning of citizens’ actions.
Publications:
Watch Democracy and Watch Congress, 116 Congress Citizen Watch Magazine, pp.25-28 (2010/11/23)
An Introduction to Basic Concepts in Jurisprudence, Law and Life, pp.1-25 (Shin Hsin University, 2010/06)
On the Distinction between Friends and Enemies in the Political, Vol. 3 No. 1, Shin Hsin Law Review, pp.74-125 (2009/12)
The Reflection of the Regulation of the Assembly Right - An Analysis from the Political, Legal, and Intellectual Perspectives, Chinatimes Newspaper (2009/07/16)
On the Modification of the Assembly Code, Chinatimes Newspaper (2009/06/24)
Lisa Eckstein
Lisa is working under the supervision of Professor Larry Gostin. Her dissertation investigates the role of community engagement strategies in promoting scientifically and ethically robust research with minority racial and ethnic groups. Prior to commencing her S.J.D., she was a legal officer at the Australia Law Reform Commission - the Australian Government's premier legal think tank. She has also worked in genetics and research policy for a range of Australian state and federal health departments.
Publications:
Lisa Eckstein, Engaging Racial and Ethnic Groups in the Regulation of Research: Lessons from Research in Emergency Settings, Houston Journal of Health Law and Policy (2012) (forthcoming) [SSRN]
Lisa Eckstein, Beyond Racial and Ethnic Analyses in Clinical Research: A Proposed Model for Institutional Review Boards, 66(2) Food and Drug Law Journal (2011) 243-265 [SSRN] [L] [W]
Edit Frenyo
Ph.D. candidate Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest
LL.M./Visiting Scholar, Boston College Law School
Doctor Iuris of Szeged, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary
Edit has been a dedicated participant in children's advocacy programs in Hungrary throught her entire upbringing and education. After having completed her undergraduate legal studies with distinction, she practiced civil law as a full time notarial clerk in Budapest. Additionally, she began a Ph.D. at Hungary's leading law faculty, focusing on children's contact rights in transborder situations.
Edit earned an LL.M. degree at Boston College Law School in 2010, where she spent the subsequent year as a visiting scholar/teaching assistant doing interdisciplinary research in the area of international human rights, family law and children's rights. She also assisted in developing a new course, International Human Rights: Semester in Practice.
At the heart of her proposed research at Georgetown is the redefinition of children's rights - identity, self-determination and open future - in the era of transnational family migration. Working with law and the social sciences, she is proposing to explore the contemporary and elusive social phenomena of transnational families in a comparative Euro-American study entitled: "Transnational family - Transfrontier Childhoods: Rethinking Children's Rights in the Transnational Family." Edit's long term plans include practicing and teaching in the area of children's welfare, acting as a mediator between civil society and the legal sphere. Edit is working under the supervision of Professor Judith Areen.
Chien-yu Liu
LL.M. New York Univeristy
LL.B. National Taiwan University
Chien-yu Liu is an S.J.D. candidate from Taiwan. Chien-yu graduate from New York University (NYU) School of Law with an LL.M. degree in International Legal Studies and received her LL.B. degree in Financial and Economic Law from National Taiwan University. While at NYU, she worked as a research assistant for the NYU U.S.-Asia Law Institute, completed her master's thesis on international environmental law under the supervision of Professor Katrina Wyman, and conducted directed research on international humanitarian law under the supervision of Professor Philip Alston.
In summer 2008, she was awarded the NYU School of Law Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) and Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) Fellowship and interned at the United Nations International Law Commission (UNILC) in Geneva, Switzerland. She did an externship with the law firm Earthjustice based in Oakland, CA. She has also workedon many English-Mandarin translation and editing projects, including U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights cases. In addition to her research and work experiences, Chien-yu passed Taiwan's bar exam in 2007, and knows French at a conversational level and some German.
Her research interests include international environmental law and international human rights law. Currently, she is working with Professor Edith Brown Weiss to study the legal issues that unfold in protecting persons that are internally displaced due to natural disasters and how the international community should respond to such events under international law.
Sangkul Kim
LL.M. Georgetown
LL.B. Korea University, Seoul
Sangkul Kim completed his LL.B. at Korea University in Seoul before working in the legal departments of multinational corporations. He subsequently obtained an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from Georgetown University Law Center. From 2004 to 2008, Sangkul worked as Associate Legal Adviser in the Legal Advisory Section and the Prosecution Division of the Office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court. Under the supervision of Professor David Luban, Sangkul is engaged in research in the field of international criminal law. He serves as a member of the editorial board of the Forum for International Criminal and Humanitarian Law Publication Series.
Publications:
The Means of Proof of International Sex Crimes, in Understanding and Proving International Sex Crimes (Morten Bergsmo, Alf Butenschon and Elizabeth J. Wood eds.), FICHL Publication Series, no. 12, pp. 225-265 (2012). [WWW]
The Anatomy of the Means of Proof Digest, in Active Complementarity: Legal Information Transfer (Morten Bergsmo ed.), FICHL Publication Series, no. 8, pp. 197-221 (2011). [WWW]
Nationalized International Criminal Law: Genocidal Intent, Command Responsibility and an Overview of the South Korean Implementing Legislation of the ICC Statute, 19 Michigan State Journal of International Law 589-637 (2011) (with Tae Hyun Choi) [HEIN]
ICC Prosecutor’s Duty to Disclose Exculpatory Evidence and His Acts of Deciding Exculpatory Nature Thereof, 637 Korean Lawyers Association Journal (Bup Jo) 108-153 (2009) (in Korean)
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Durgham Saif
LL.M. Washington College of Law, American University
LL.B. Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University
Before taking up his doctorate at Georgetown in 2010, Durgham served as an attorney and clinical faculty member at the Law and Arab Minority Clinic, at the Faculty of Law, Haifa University. He previously served in the same position at the Human Rights Clinic at Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel-Aviv University. From 2005-2008, Saif served as Director General of the Karamah Organization for Human Rights. Karamah (“Dignity” in Arabic) is a Palestinian human rights organization based in Nazareth focused on human and social rights for the Palestinian minority in Israel. Saif’s academic research interests are Minority Rights, Indigenous Peoples Rights, Human Rights, and International Law. His current research focuses on critical analyses of the legal status of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Durgham is working under the supervision of Profesor Lama Abu-Odeh.
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Diane Webber
LL.M. Georgetown - Certificate in National Security Law
LL.B. (Hons.) University of London
Diane is a British solicitor and has worked in London in private practice, focusing on criminal law (particularly white collar fraud), employment and discrimination law, and sports and entertainment law. She has recently returned to study in the area of national security law. Her area of research is preventive detention, focusing on whether it is possible to craft a legal framework for preventive detention of terrorist suspects that would satisfy both law enforcement and human rights concerns. Diane's dissertation is being written under the supervision of Professor David Stewart.
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Publications:
Preventive Detention in the Law of Armed Conflict: Throwing Away the Key? (forthcoming, Fall 2011, in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy) [SSRN]
Education as a Counterterrorism Tool and the Curious Case of the Texas School Book Resolution (forthcoming, Fall 2011, in the Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class) [SSRN]
Can We Find and Stop the ‘Jihad Janes’?, 19 Cardozo J. of Int’l & Comp. L. 91 (2011) [SSRN] [L] [W]
Extreme Measures: Does the U.S. Need Preventive Detention to Combat Domestic Terrorism? A Comparison of Preventive Detention Models in U.S., U.K., France & Israel. 14 Touro Int’l. L. Rev. 128 (2010) [SSRN] [W]
