Moria Paz is a Fellow in International Law at Stanford Law School. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Teaching Fellow of the Stanford Program for International Legal Studies (SPILS). Her research addresses three main areas of public international law affecting cultural minorities: the protection of language rights, transnational migration, and transnational governance. In her recent work, she is particularly concerned with the gap between international law’s promise of inviolable rights for all, irrespective of the costs of vindicating these rights, and the way that these commitments are actually applied to minority communities in practice. The gap between announced principles and actual judicial decisions raises two questions that her work explores: Is international law really committed to achieving its aspirational goals, and capable of doing so? And are there better alternatives to the current ad hoc approach to legal decision making? Earlier work examined cross-border networks, with a particular focus on networks of private schools operated by ethnic and/or religious minorities, and investigated the legal frameworks through which such groups are defined and within which they operate.

Key publications include a book manuscript, Network Or State? International Law and The History of Jewish Self-Determination, forthcoming with the Oxford University Press in 2013; The Failed Promise of Language Rights; A Critique of the International Language Rights Regime, Harvard Int’l L Journal forthcoming; States and Networks in the Formation of International Law, forthcoming; Am. U Int’l L Rev; A Non-Territorial Ethnic-Religious Network and the Making of Human Rights Law: The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 4 Interdisc. J. Hum. Rts. L. 1 (2010). She received her S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, where her dissertation was awarded the Laylin Prize for the best paper written in the field of public international law in 2007. While at Harvard, she was awarded a number of fellowships, including at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, The European Law Research Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.