Professor Davidson will be visiting Georgetown Law in spring 2024.
Professor Davidson is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Law Faculty, Tel Aviv University, which she joined 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 teaches and researches international human rights law and constitutional law from interdisciplinary perspectives, 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. 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.
