Postdoctoral Scholars and Doctoral Fellows

Debadatta Bose is a postdoctoral scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory (BCPLT). Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University, The Netherlands where he contributed to studying the overlap between labor law and corporate responsibility law. Debadatta’s research focuses on the intersection of public international law and private law theory, with a particular emphasis on corporate responsibility for adverse human rights impacts of business activities. He is equally passionate about Third World Approaches to International Law and decolonial approaches to law more broadly. He has enriched the academic experience of students at the University of Amsterdam through his courses on international investment law, and international law and sustainable development, and at Tilburg University through his courses on obligations and contracts law, and international labor law and globalization.

At BCPLT, Debadatta will research on articulating postcolonial private law through Hanoch Dagan and Avihay Dorfman’s theory of relational justice. This builds on his Ph.D. where, using relational justice theory, he articulated a transnational corporate responsibility to prevent and mitigate adverse human rights impacts in corporate supply chains.

Debadatta is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on Law and Responsible Business, and his scholarship has been widely published internationally in journals like the ICSID Review and the Business and Human Rights Journal. He was the (co-)Chair of the Working Group on Business and Human Rights at the Netherlands National Network for Human Rights Research, the Dutch national body of human rights academics.

He earned his Ph.D. from the Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam, his LL.M. (cum laude) in International and European Union Law from Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and his B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from Damodaram Sanjivayya National Law University, India. He was the valedictorian in both his LL.M. and B.A. LL.B. (Hons.). He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University.

Pinchas Huberman (J.S.D., Yale Law School, J.D., University of Toronto, Faculty of Law) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory. He was previously a Resident Fellow with the Yale Information Society Project and a Doctoral Fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Pinchas’ research interests include tort law, private law theory, constitutional law, free speech, analytic and normative jurisprudence, and the intersections of law and technology. His previous work, exploring theories of tort liability for harms caused by emergent technologies, has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence and Osgoode Hall Law Journal.

Stav is an incoming Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Private Law Theory. She is currently completing a JSD degree from New York University School of Law, where she was a Fellow at the Information Law Institute and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Her dissertation explores the propertization of information privacy law, and includes an exploration of the social psychological roots linking privacy and property, as well as the intersection between copyright and personal data. Stav holds an LL.M. in Legal Theory from NYU and an undergraduate degree in law and psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to her graduate studies, she clerked in the Office of the Attorney General in Israel.

Matt is a Ph.D. student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program, and a J.D. candidate at NYU School of Law. He is focused on the study of law and globalization.

Matt researches the legal structure of the global economy, with a particular focus on international trade law and private law. He is also using the law to track how globalization reshaped perceptions of our obligations to people in different times and places. This work draws on a range of methodologies, including history, legal theory and political thought. With this research, Matt seeks to advance discussions about new ways to govern the global economy and structure the international order. 

Isabella Luisa Mariani is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley School of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program with a Designated Emphasis in Political Economy. She is a Doctoral Fellow with the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her research lies at the intersection of Law, Philosophy, and Political Economy. Her dissertation examines the attention economy, analyzing its effects on our autonomy and interpersonal relationships, the market power of technology companies, and potential regulatory and legal responses.

She holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, for which she received First Class Honors for her thesis entitled “Corruption and Justice: Restoring Institutional Integrity.” She is the recipient of the 2016 University of Auckland Faculty of Arts International Master’s Degree Scholarship. She holds a Joint Honors Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Political Science from McGill University. Her work is funded by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

Daimeon Shanks-Dumont is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. An historian by training and temperament, his dissertation research focuses on the contested histories of sovereign equality and international hierarchy in international law, and the relationship between historical energy regimes, world economic systems, and inter-sovereign relations conceptualized through the framework of private contract law theory. He has published on a range of theoretical areas, including the self-funding structures of U.S. administrative agencies, the aesthetic dimensions of law and legal order, the early histories of international humanitarian law, international environmental law and the criminalization of ecocide, and other sundry topics.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Daimeon received a J.D. from the University of Colorado, where he earned certificates in International Law and Federal Indian Law. During law school, he worked as a legal assistant to the Chair of the United Nations’ International Law Commission in New York and Geneva, and helped represent the Maya indigenous people of Southern Belize before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Prior to his legal career, Daimeon spent over a decade in professional cycling, working Grand Tours, Classics, World Cups, World Championships, and the Olympics, and published a bicycle repair manual in 2012.

Daimeon plans to go on the law-teaching market in the fall of 2025, and hopes to teach administrative law, contract, property, Federal Indian law, international law and international human rights, energy and environmental law, jurisprudence and legal theory, and/or criminal law.