Previous Fellows Academic Program

I am a cultural and intellectual historian of Early Modern Europe, specializing in British History. I focus on questions of economic and religious culture, exploring how the profound socioeconomic changes of the 17th and 18th centuries affected religious culture and transformed the ways Europeans engaged with their religious heritage. I am currently embarking on a new project, which explores the mutual relations of commercialism and the Bible in Early Modern English society. The project questions the assumption that economic modernization and secularization are inseparable companions. Instead of a progressive narrative of secularization, I argue that the Bible remained a central lens by which contemporaries made sense of, and adapted to, their rapidly changing economic system.

In my dissertation, I explored the ways in which conceptions of Jews and Judaism changed during this period and served as means for Britons to think through on their commercializing society. This is the base of a book-project I am now in the process of writing, which illuminates public concerns in early modern Britain with Jews and Judaism as an important lens for understanding contemporaries’ grapple with the modernizing economy. Past projects of mine involved the history of crime and punishment and of popular print, fields that still preoccupy me. I have earned my PhD from the Hebrew University (2018) and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (2018-2019).

 "Ioannis Kampourakis will join the Edmond J. Safra Center as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the program 'Markets, Ethics, and the Law'. His research interest revolve around legal and social theory, public law and regulation of corporate actors, and law and globalization. Since 2018, Ioannis has been a Career Development Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. Prior to this appointment, Ioannis was a Doctoral Fellow in Law at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the international, interdisciplinary 'Human Rights Under Pressure' doctoral program. He was awarded his PhD with the designation summa cum laude. Ioannis also holds a 'Master 2 - Droit Public Fondamental' from Université Paris I - Sorbonne and a 4-year LLB from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Ioannis has also been a visiting fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the South African Institute of Advanced Constitutional Law (SAIFAC). He has has also worked as a trainee lawyer for the Legal Council of State in Athens, Greece, appointed to the Ministry of Administrative Reform. Apart from his academic endeavours, Ioannis is also a published author of fiction and he has been shortlisted for the 'National Literature Award - Prize for Debut Author' in Greece."

Klaas holds law degrees from the University of Cologne and Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), passed the German bar exam at the High Court of Berlin and was a PhD Fellow at Humboldt-University’s European Law School in Berlin as well as a Research Assistant at the Chair for Private Law and Legal Theory in Cologne. He has held previous visiting positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at Tel Aviv University. Since 2014, Klaas is part of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School’s multidisciplinary Law and Global Production Working Group. His practical experience includes foreign clerkship positions at the Supreme Court of the State of Israel and the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as well as positions with an international arbitration boutique and the German Ministry of Economic Affairs. 

 Klaas‘s research interests are centered around the role of (private) law in social and technological change, particularly through an angle of contract, competition and transnational law as well as human rights. His work draws broadly on social sciences, socio-legal theory and the history of legal thought. His PhD dissertation deals with the legal form and blind spots of global value chain capitalism. 

​At Safra, Klaas will work on the normative orders of global value chains and their interfaces with consumer sovereignty and public and private regulation. Besides, he will develop a new project on the private governance of urban transformation and smart cities. 

Lucila de Almeida is a Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel-Aviv University (2019-2020). Prior Joining TAU, Lucila has been a Research Associate at the Florence School of Regulation, Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Visiting Fellow at the Università Degli Studi di Padova and Universitè Catholique de Louvain.

Lucila received her Ph.D. (2017) and LL.M. (2013) in Law at the European University Institute (EUI) fully financed by the European Research Council, M.A. in Law and Development at School of Law of Fundação Getúlio Vargas São Paulo funded by the Mario Henrique Simonsen Scholarship, and LL.B. at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. In her career, Lucila has carried investigations in projects funded by the European Research Council, Inter-American Development Bank, the Academy of Finland, and the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. She also integrates the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Consumer Law at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Lucila interdisciplinary research focuses on Energy regulation & and private law. She is the author of many peer-reviewed papers, and co-editor of the books "Sustainable Consumption" (Springer 2019), and "Transformation of Economic Law" (Hart Publishing 2019).

Besides her publications, Lucila has been a member of several editorial boards, including two Oxford legal journals - European Journal of International Law and International Journal of Constitutional Law - European Journal of Legal Studies, and DESC-FACAMP.

Dr. Nethanel Lipshitz’s research focuses on basic equality, the idea that all human beings are — in some sense that is central to ethics and political philosophy — fundamentally equal. In his work, he explores the justification, scope and normative implications of basic equality, as well as related issues concerning moral status and distributive justice (including, recently, distributive justice in education, on which he is co-authoring a book with Dr. Efrat Ram-Tiktin of Bar Ilan University). In addition, Dr. Lipshitz is interested in legal positivism, the justification of punishment, and the meaning of dignity and respect.

At the Safra Center, Dr. Lipshitz will work on the ways basic equality informs two problems in political philosophy: the justification of cosmopolitan justice, and the definition and scope of wrongful discrimination.

Dr. Lipshitz earned his B.A at the Hebrew University (2006, Psychology and Amirim), and his PhD at the University of Chicago (2018, Philosophy). Between these degrees, Dr. Lipshitz did graduate work in philosophy at the Hebrew University (where he was also a teaching assistant), and was part of the team writing the Israeli psychometric exam and the specialized entrance exam for medical students. Last year, he was the Law and Philosophy Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Rona Dinur completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by Prof. David Enoch and Prof. Moshe Halbertal. She started her Ph.D. studies after graduating from Harvard Law School with an LL.M in Law, where she focused on the intersection of constitutional law and moral and political philosophy. She holds an LL.B/B.A (in Law and Political Science) from the Hebrew University (summa cum laude). In between her bachelor's degree and LL.M studies she served as a law clerk in the chambers of Justice Asher Grunis, who was then the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court.

Rona is interested in moral, political and legal philosophy (in the analytic tradition), and its applications to legal analysis (especially constitutional law). She's also interested in the philosophy of mind and perception, especially in integrating empirical studies in cognitive psychology with moral analysis of phenomena related to inter-group relations, and the applications of these to anti-discrimination law. In her dissertation project she examines the moral objection to discrimination. Based on the view that discrimination is objectionable because it violates the value of equality in its relational interpretation, and in line with major studies in cognitive psychology, she argues that discriminatory actions are objectionable due to the discriminator's underlying perceptual state, which involves perceptually dehumanizing the victims due to their group identity. Further applications of the analysis offered in her dissertation include clarifying oft-cited moral claims associated with discrimination, such as the claim that it is wrong to generalize about groups of people, or that people should be treated as individuals; and facilitating a clearer and more philosophically-informed legal analysis and empirical research on discrimination and anti-discrimination law, especially on discrimination stemming from implicit bias.

Samuel Segura Cobos received his PhD (2018) in International History with a focus on financial and economic history from the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland. He holds a master’s in international Relations from Macquarie University, Australia and a master’s in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute Geneva. He also holds an interdisciplinary Bachelor’s in International Relations from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico and a Certificate in International Politics from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Samuel is an historian and social scientist interested in the institutional diversity enabling exchange relationships across societies. His research underscores the role that expectations, beliefs, worldviews, norms, rules and organisations play in institutional complexes addressing the separation in time and space of exchange transactions. By studying the late emergence of the British Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) in 1919, Samuel’s research argues that during the second half of the nineteenth century, an emancipation of individuals as economic agents, who could freely interact based on standardised contracts rather than drawing on reputation-based networks, took place. This emancipatory process required the careful construction of the paradigm of a rational, calculating individual in legal doctrine. The pursuit of societies based on calculating individuals that this emancipatory process enabled resulted in new dilemmas during the early twentieth century such as the rise of protectionism and financial turmoil. At TAU, Samuel will seek to compare the British and American processes.

Yifat is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Her project offers a new point of view to the theoretical discussions on fiduciary law and suggests that an examination of the different ways in which fiduciary duty is applied in different Common Law countries is needed in order to achieve a better understanding of this legal concept. Hence, the project focuses on situations of divergence regarding the boundaries of fiduciary law, by comparing case law on different categories of fiduciary relationships in various countries. Using this vast database, the research shows that in fact, there are two perceptions of fiduciary concept, a proprietary perception and an interpersonal perception, and explains the implications of this conclusion. 

Yifat also holds an undergraduate degree in Law and International Relations (cum laude) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2010), and a Master of Laws (with distinction) from University College London (2014). Prior to her Ph.D. studies, Yifat worked as pre-intern in the High Court of Justice Department of the State Attorney; intern and legal associate in a private firm, and as a Judicial Assistant in the Central Region District Court. She also worked as a Teaching Assistant (Property Law & Constitutional Law) and is currently an adjunct professor (Restitution of Unjust Enrichment) at Tel-Aviv University.

Yifat’s research at the Safra Center discusses the location of the duty of loyalty, both actual and desirable, on the scale between rules and standards.

Guy Schultz is a Ph.D. Candidate at the School of Philosophy, Linguistics and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University. His research is about the relationship between justice and philanthropy, based upon theories and perspectives situated in the tradition of analytic political philosophy. Guy’s M.A. thesis, for which he obtained his M.A. in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2015, focused on the legitimacy of states relying upon citizens’ philanthropic donations for funding public causes. Since 2016, he has been a Research Fellow at the Institute for Law and Philanthropy at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, where he has gained valuable familiarity with various empirical and theoretical aspects of philanthropy, especially as it is practiced in Israel. Guy has presented his work on normative questions regarding philanthropy at numerous international forums dedicated to philanthropy and civil society studies. He is fluent in English and Hebrew, is competent in Russian and intermediate in French.

Maytal Bar-Hai is a Ph.D candidate at the Tel-Aviv University Law Faculty. In her dissertation, supervised by Prof. Ariel Porat, Maytal seeks to set the theoretical foundations for recognizing non-economic damages in tort law for the loss of a close relationship. In her work she explores different philosophical perspectives on the purpose of tort law.

Maytal holds an LL.M from Tel-Aviv University and an LL.B. (magna cum laude) in Law and Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Maytal served as Editor-in-Chief of the Hebrew University Law Review, and prior to focusing on research she served as a Senior Law Clerk for Israel’s Supreme Court Justices Eliezer Rivlin, Deputy President (Ret.) and Asher D. Grunis, President (Ret.). 

Nadia Tzimerman is a Ph.D. fellow at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, Tel-Aviv University. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of Prof. Issachar (Issi) Rosen-Zvi and Dr. David Schorr, has two aims. Firstly, it establishes a theoretical framework for the justification of public ownership of natural resources, and secondly, it analyzes the origins and the evolution of the Israeli Petroleum Act of 1952 based on this theoretical framework. Nadia’s LL.M Thesis focused on the history of Israeli Petroleum Act and its initial findings were published in an article, co-written with Dr. Yair Sagy, entitled "This is Not the Way!: On the Sources of Section 33 of the Petroleum Act". The article was subsequently cited twice by the Supreme Court of Israel (H.C 4491/13 and H.C 4374/15).

Nadia received her Master of Laws (LL.M) from Harvard Law School in 2008 after completing an LL.B (summa cum laude) and a B.A. in Economics at the University of Haifa. After graduation at Harvard, Nadia took up a position as a consultant for the Doing Business Project at the World Bank in Washington DC. In 2011 Nadia founded the Marine Resources, Law and Policy Legal Clinic at the University of Haifa and directed it for seven years.