Diffusion Through Democracy

On October 5, Katerina Linos, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the Larry Neal Prize for Excellence in EU Scholarship, delivered a lecture on her award-winning article, “Diffusion through Democracy,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (55.3). The Larry Neal Prize was initiated by the EU Center at Illinois to recognize excellent research conducted by affiliated faculty of the ten EU Centers of Excellence located throughout the United States. You can watch her full lecture below or by clicking here:

Katerina Linos' research and teaching interests include international law, comparative law, European Union law, employment law and health care law. To address questions in these fields, her work combines legal analysis with empirical methods. In Compliance with European Union Directives, she explores empirically why the most integrated international community we know, the European Union, stumbled in its efforts to harmonize the laws of its member states. In Path Dependence in Discrimination Law, she compares early race discrimination cases in the U.S., and early sex discrimination cases in the E.U., and illustrates how early doctrinal developments predict the success and failure of current national origin, age, disability, and sexual orientation claims in the two jurisdictions. In her current project, Diffusion through Democracy (forthcoming, American Journal of Political Science), Linos examines why soft international law and transnational norms often trigger major national legal reforms, despite the strong constraints domestic constituencies impose on leaders of democratic states. Prior to joining the Boalt faculty, Linos was an International Law Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard Law School, where she had previously received her J.D. She also recently completed a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard, in parallel with a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows.