Galit A. Sarfaty

Assistant Professor

A.B., Harvard University; J.D., Yale Law School; M.A., Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Chicago

Tel: 604-827-1808
Fax: 604-822-8108
Email: sarfaty@law.ubc.ca
Office Location: Allard Hall, 453

Profile

Galit A. Sarfaty is an Assistant Professor at the UBC Faculty of Law. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University. She previously served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her position at Wharton, Professor Sarfaty was a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession and Human Rights Program, a Graduate Fellow at Harvard's Center for Ethics, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her writing is informed by her work experience in a number of organizations, including the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the Indian Law Resource Center.

Professor Sarfaty's scholarship offers an anthropological perspective to the study of international law and regulatory governance, with a particular focus on non-state actors (including corporations, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and indigenous communities). She uses ethnographic methods to understand the internal decision making and regulatory processes of legal institutions as well as the role of lawyers within them. She also analyzes the interplay between international, national, and local norms and the mechanisms through which norms migrate and become internalized. In particular, she has focused on the convergence of economic globalization with public law values, such as human rights. Professor Sarfaty is especially concerned with organizational behavior and culture as these intersect with the law.

Professor Sarfaty's research has focused on such major international economic organizations as the World Bank, and she has recently published a book on the subject entitled Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank (Stanford, 2012). Her earlier article on the World Bank was the winner of the 2010 Francis Deák Prize, awarded to a younger author for meritorious scholarship published in the American Journal of International Law. Her study of the Bank's use of economic tools to measure human rights inspired her latest research on the implications of using quantitative indicators in global private regulation. Her article, "Regulating Through Numbers: A Case Study of Corporate Sustainability Reporting," is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law and was recently selected for presentation at the 2012 Stanford-Yale-Harvard Junior Faculty Forum.

Research Interests

• Public and Private International Law
• International Economic Law
• Human Rights
• Regulatory Governance
• Law and Development
• Legal Profession
• Organizational Culture

Academic Publications

Regulating Through Numbers: A Case Study of Corporate Sustainability Reporting, 53 Va. J. Int'l L. (forthcoming 2013) (selected for presentation at the 2012 Stanford-Yale-Harvard Junior Faculty Forum)

Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank (Stanford University Press, 2012)

Why Culture Matters in International Institutions: The Marginality of Human Rights at the World Bank, 103 Am. J. Int'l L. 647 (2009) (peer-reviewed journal) (winner of the 2010 Francis Deák Prize, awarded to a younger author for meritorious scholarship published in the American Journal of International Law)

Measuring Justice: Internal Conflict over the World Bank's Empirical Approach to Human Rights, in Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (Kamari Clarke & Mark Goodale eds., Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009)

International Norm Diffusion in the Pimicikamak Cree Nation: A Model of Legal Mediation, 48 Harv. Int'l L.J. 441 (2007)

Doing Good Business or Just Doing Good: Competing Human Rights Frameworks at the World Bank, in The Intersection of Rights and Regulation: New Directions in Sociolegal Scholarship (Bronwen Morgan ed., Ashgate Press, 2007)

Note, The World Bank and the Internalization of Indigenous Rights Norms, 114 Yale L.J.1791 (2005)

Book Review, 30 Yale J. Int'l L. 338 (2005) (reviewing Salman M.A. Salman & Siobhan McInerney-Lankford, The Human Right to Water: Legal and Policy Dimensions (2004))

Book Review, 98 Am. J. Int'l L. 398 (2004) (reviewing Mac Darrow, Between Light and Shadow: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and International Human Rights Law (2003))

Book Review, 28 Yale J. Int'l L. 275 (2003) (reviewing Karen Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (2002))

Other Publications

Jim Yong Kim Will Face the World Bank's Culture of Economists. Let's Hope it Won't Be Pretty, The Washington Post Online, June 29, 2012

Publications listed on the UBC Law Library Faculty Research Publications Database