Aslı Ü. Bâli

Aslı Ü. Bâli is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Bâli’s teaching and research interests include public international law — particularly human rights law and the law of the international security order — and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. She has written on the nuclear non-proliferation regime, humanitarian intervention, the roles of race and empire in the interpretation and enforcement of international law, the role of judicial independence in constitutional transitions, federalism and decentralization in the Middle East, and constitutional design in religiously divided societies. Bâli’s scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of Chicago Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Chicago Journal of International Law, Cornell Journal of International Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of International Law Unbound, Geopolitics, Studies in Law, Politics and Society, and in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. She has also written essays and op-eds for such venues as The New York Times, The Boston Review, The London Review of Books, Jacobin, and Dissent.

Bâli received her doctorate in Politics from Princeton University in 2010 and her law degree from Yale. Before joining academia, she worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb, where she specialized in international transactions and sovereign representation. 

Prior to joining Yale Law School, Bâli was Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where she served as the founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and as Director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. She was also a core faculty member of the Critical Race Studies program. In 2022, she was awarded the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest honor for distinction in the classroom at the UCLA School of Law. Immediately prior to her appointment at UCLA, she served as the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. 

Bâli currently serves as co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch and as chair of both the Task Force on Civil and Human Rights of the Middle East Studies Association and the MESA Global Academy. She is also on the board of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association and on the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law.