Sharon Weill

Professor of International Law, Sharon Weill joined The American University of Paris in 2018, where she directs the Justice Lab. In 2022, she was nominated as a Research Associate at the Centre for Comparative Law & the Internationalization of Law at Sorbonne University. Alongside these roles, she teaches at the master’s programs of Sciences Po Paris and Paris II University. She holds a PhD from the Law Faculty of the University of Geneva (2012), and her postdoctoral research was conducted at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley (2015-2016). She is a member of the Law and Society Association (LSA), the Onati Center for Socio-Legal Studies and the International Law Association (ILA).

In addition to her academic work, she served as an expert member of the French National Consultative Commission for Human Rights (CNCDH) (2018-2021) and as a judge in the French Asylum Court (UNHCR nomination, 2019-2022).

Her research focuses on the relationship between law, conflicts, and the role of courts - topics on which she has published numerous articles, chapters and books. Her method combines legal doctrine with socio-political approaches including trial ethnography.  

Since 2017, she has been co directing empirical research within the French terrorism courts with a multidisciplinary research team for Mission Droit et Justice (CNRS/Ministry of Justice). In 2022, Professor Weill got a second grant to co-direct two-year multidisciplinary empirical research on French Asylum courts. Prior to that, she led research projects on the hybrid court in Senegal (Berkeley-France Foundation), the Guantanamo military commissions, and the Israeli military courts in the Occupied Palestinian territories (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation). Additionally, she held positions as a visiting research fellow in the ERC project 'Security in Transition' under the guidance of Professor Mary Kaldor at LSE and served as a research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law for several years.

She is the author of the monograph The Role of National Courts in Applying International Humanitarian Law (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-editor of the book Prosecuting the President - The Trial of Hissène Habré (Oxford University Press, 2020). Currently she is working on her third book Terror on trial: An Ethnography of French Court (under contract with Cambridge Series in Law and Society, forthcoming).