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Professor Aslı Ü. Bâli ’99 Joins Schell Center as Faculty Co-Director

Professor Aslı Ü. Bâli
Professor Aslı Ü. Bâli is the Schell Center’s new faculty co-director.

Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law Aslı Ü. Bâli ’99 has joined the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights as faculty co-director. She will lead Yale Law School’s hub for the study of human rights alongside Clinical Professor of Law Claudia M. Flores, who has served as faculty co-director since 2024.

Bâli succeeds Paul W. Kahn ’80, Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, who is stepping down as faculty co-director after 26 years. Kahn, together with emeritus Faculty Co-Director James J. Silk ’89, Binger Clinical Professor Emeritus of Human Rights, has educated generations of Yale students about human rights work around the globe. Bâli and Flores will build upon the Schell Center’s history of human rights programming, enriching international human rights scholarship and practice at Yale and beyond.

“As a graduate of Yale Law focused on human rights throughout my career, I know what a vital role the Schell Center plays in ensuring that rigorous scholarship and the practice of human rights inform one another,” Bâli said. “At a moment when the international human rights system faces acute challenges, that kind of engagement could not be more important. I’m honored to join the center and excited to work with Claudia, our students, and colleagues across Yale to build on the Schell Center’s remarkable legacy while asking how human rights institutions and advocacy can meet the challenges of the present.”

Aslı Ü. Bâli and Claudia Flores
Professors Aslı Ü. Bâli and Claudia Flores are faculty co-directors of the Schell Center.

Before joining the Yale Law School faculty in July 2022, Bâli was at UCLA School of Law. There, she was awarded the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching, UCLA Law’s highest honor for distinction in the classroom. Across her faculty appointments, Bâli’s teaching and research has spanned public international law — particularly human rights law and the law of the international security order — and comparative Middle Eastern constitutional law. 

Bâli brings more than two decades of academic center leadership experience to the Schell Center. While at UCLA, she served as the founding faculty director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, building the school’s now prominent human rights programming from scratch. She was also director of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. She has also served as co-director of the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization since joining Yale.

Outside of Yale, Bâli is co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch, a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. From 2023 to 2025 she served as the President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

“Aslı understands that human rights work advances through real exchange — scholars and practitioners in genuine conversation with each other,” Flores said. “That’s exactly what this moment calls for, when the international human rights system is under more strain than it’s been in decades. I’m thrilled to lead the Schell Center alongside her, and I look forward to bringing that kind of exchange to our community.”

Since its founding in 1989, the Schell Center has been a forum for international human rights practitioners to consider the theoretical issues of their work and scholars of human rights to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue. Its programming has included the weekly Human Rights Workshop, which brings scholars and practitioners together to discuss current human rights issues, and the podcast Entitled, which examines the pressing debates and open questions shaping human rights today. The Center houses the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, giving students firsthand experience in human rights advocacy, and has provided students and recent graduates with further human rights experience through the Kirby Simon Summer Human Rights Fellowships and the Robert Bernstein and Robina Foundation Post-Graduate Human Rights Fellowships.