Liat Dasht is a J.S.D. candidate and an Information Society Project (ISP) fellow at Yale Law School, where she also earned her LL.M. degree as a Fulbright Scholar in 2022. She further holds an LL.B. in Law and a B.A. in Philosophy, completed summa cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2019).
Before her graduate studies at Yale, Liat served as an instructor and teaching assistant at both the Hebrew University Faculty of Law – in introductory and advanced courses in contract law, constitutional law, and civil procedure – and the Hebrew University Department of Philosophy. At Yale, she teaches at Yale Department of Philosophy in the area of moral philosophy. As a research assistant at Yale Law School and the Hebrew University Faculty of Law, Liat has been working on projects in normative and analytical jurisprudence, constitutional law and constitutional theory, tort law, criminal law, the economic analysis of law, and cybersecurity. Outside of academia, Liat worked as a research assistant in a leading Israeli think-tank (the Israel Democracy Institute), focusing on the issue of local government corruption from the perspectives of administrative law and public policy. During her undergraduate studies, Liat was editor-in-chief of the Hebrew University Law Review, Mishpatim (online edition).
In the public sector, Liat served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Ronnen of the Economic Division of the Tel Aviv District Court (currently of the Supreme Court of Israel), which specializes in complex corporate law and economic cases, and for the Head-Judge of the Israel Appeals Tribunal in the Ministry of Justice, which is an expert administrative tribunal for immigration, citizenship, residency, and refugee law. As part of her endeavors within civil society, Liat also pursued clinical legal work in the field of international human rights and worked in NGOs dealing with human rights issues, democratic participation, refugees, and organized labor.
Liat’s main areas of research currently revolve around the intersections of law and analytic philosophy, especially in the fields of constitutional law, human rights, free speech, contract law, and legal, moral, and political philosophy, as well as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action. Her dissertation, which focuses on the state, deals with the moral grounds for the responsibility and rights of collective agents – such as states and corporations – and their connection to the desired scope and interpretation of such collectives’ responsibilities, obligations, and rights under the law. Among other things, Liat’s thesis, which invokes the distinction between moral agency and moral status, provides a source of justification and explanation for the difference between the rights that the state may (not) have against individual persons (e.g., in constitutional contexts), and those that it might have against other states (e.g., in international law). In philosophy, Liat takes a further interest in metaethics and epistemology.
Liat’s work in the areas of law and philosophy and public law has received several awards and prizes and was presented at academic conferences in the U.S. and Israel. Her first law review article was published in the Hebrew University Law Review in 2020 (co-authored with Professor Ehud Guttel and Dr. Yuval Procaccia).
Doctoral Committee
Professors Scott J. Shapiro (chair), Jack M. Balkin (reader), Stephen Darwall (reader, Yale Philosophy Department), Daniel Markovits (reader), and Gideon D. Yaffe (reader). Additionally, Professor David Enoch (from Oxford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) acts as an independent advisor.
Education
LL.M., Yale Law School, 2022
LL.B., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2019
B.A. (Philosophy), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2019
Contact information
liat.dasht@yale.edu