Malyi Visiting Fellows
The Malyi Visiting Fellowship Program offers an opportunity for scholars and practitioners to engage with cutting-edge research and interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of legal and institutional frameworks in promoting integrity, accountability, and justice. As part of the University of Chicago’s tradition of academic excellence, the program fosters dialogue between diverse perspectives, combining rigorous legal analysis with insights from political science, economics, sociology, and philosophy.
Through the Fellowship, visiting scholars contribute their expertise on topics related to the institutional underpinnings of legal systems, mechanisms for maintaining the rule of law, and the interplay between law, policy, and governance. Fellows benefit from a dynamic environment for advancing their research, collaborating with leading scholars, and participating in a variety of workshops, seminars, and public lectures.
2026-2027 Malyi Postdoctoral Fellow
Paulina Milewska is a Malyi Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer of Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She submitted her PhD in Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her dissertation offers a comparative analysis of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) as instruments of democratic backsliding in Poland and the United States.
Paulina has also served as a visiting researcher at the University of New South Wales and, as a Fulbright Schuman Scholar, at New York University. Paulina began her career as a journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading newspaper, before moving into media freedom advocacy and policy work. Alongside her doctoral research, she has held senior roles at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, served as an expert on the Special Commission under the Polish Prime Minister investigating state-driven assaults on civil society, and testified before the European Parliament on anti-SLAPP legislation.
Her writing has appeared in the European Constitutional Law Review, Verfassungsblog, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Paulina is an associate editor of I•CONnect blog, and she has been a fellow of the German Marshall Fund, the BMW Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and Humanity in Action.
Autumn 2026 Malyi Fellows
Janka Deli is the Miller Empirical Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and a Nonresident Academic Fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School. Her research examines how legal institutions shape economic behavior, with a particular focus on the relationship between the rule of law and business activity. Drawing on law and economics and empirical methods, she studies when markets reinforce legal institutions and when they instead adapt to their decline. During her doctorate at Stanford, she was the Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law and a Data Science Scholar. She holds a JSD and JSM from Stanford and a JD (summa cum laude) from Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest.
Maria Gabriela Ferreira is a Ph.D. candidate in law at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), where she also earned her master's degree in civil procedural law, and a senior attorney in São Paulo, where her practice is in civil litigation and arbitration. She is the author of O compartilhamento de competências no processo civil [Competence Sharing in Civil Procedure] (JusPodivm, 2020). Her Ph.D thesis examines how Brazilian civil procedure safeguards judicial impartiality. She completed graduate coursework in the economic analysis of civil procedure at the University of São Paulo Law School, writing there on judicial decision-making and on what behavioral economics implies for the assumption that adjudication is a purely rational process.
Spring 2026 Malyi Fellow
Jorge Melgarejo Raggini is a Paraguayan scholar of constitutional law. He earned his law degree with honors from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción, his master's degree in Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America from the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Buenos Aires), and his Ph.D. in Public Law from Université Paris Cité (France). He is the author of articles and books on constitutional law and human rights, and his research focuses on constitutional accountability, presidentialism, and the comparative study of impeachment procedures in Latin America.
Winter 2025 Malyi Fellow
Florian Wetzlaugk is a third-year PhD Candidate (Law) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Currently, he is also a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School (Spring 2026). His doctoral research examines the institutional and conceptual consequences of different levels of constitutional specificity. At its core, his thesis aims to make an argument against the currently trending practice of making constitutions increasingly more specific. Florian holds a law degree (state exam) in Germany, for which he studied at the University of Bielefeld and the University of Freiburg as well as an LLM from New York University.
Fall 2025 Malyi Fellow
Sophio Asatiani (LL.M.) is a human rights lawyer and member of the Georgian Bar Association (criminal law section) from Tbilisi, Georgia. She is currently a Legal Officer at the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Warsaw, where she drafts legal opinions and advises on democratic lawmaking and human rights compliance. Previously, she spent more than a decade advancing justice reforms and civic freedoms in Georgia through senior roles with leading civil society organizations and by teaching human rights law at several universities, including Ilia State University.
Winter 2024 Malyi Fellow
Geser Ganbaatar is a PhD candidate in Law, Ethics, and Economics for Sustainable Development at the University of Milan, where he is also a project associate for the EU-funded COMP-LAW project. He is currently a visiting scholar at the National University of Mongolia and advises the Research and Development Institute of the Mongolian Parliament. His research focuses on democratic backsliding, employing comparative quantitative analysis to highlight its varying trajectories.
Autumn 2024 Malyi Fellow
Yeghishe holds a bachelor’s degree in jurisprudence, an LLM and PhD in International Law from Yerevan State University, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center, and a JSM from Stanford Law School.
Spring 2024 Malyi Fellows
Professor Mara Revkin holds a JD from Yale Law School (2016) and a PhD in Political Science from Yale University (2019) where her dissertation examined the Islamic State’s governance of civilians in Iraq and Syria. She uses qualitative and quantitative empirical methods including surveys, experiments, interviews, and archival research, and has conducted field research in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan. In addition to her academic research, she has worked with and advised United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations on the design of evidence-based programs and policies that aim to strengthen the rule of law and the protection of human rights, support peaceful reconciliation after conflict, and mitigate the root causes of political violence and extremism
Hanna Folsz is a 4th-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and visiting researcher at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the challenges and opportunities in countering democratic backsliding. Her dissertation studies when and why opposition parties campaign on rhetorical attacks against the incumbent or policy proposals in elections when the governing party is dismantling democracy and what opposition strategies can generate support for democracy, focusing on the cases of Hungary and Poland.
Professor Dimitry Vladimirovich Kochenov (LEGS '02) leads the Rule of Law Workgroup at CEU Democracy Institute and teaches at the Department of Legal Studies. In 2023 he has been awarded a EUR 1M grant from Stiftung Mercator to establish Clinical Rule of Law work in Budapest, which is his main on-going project. Prof. Kochenov's research focuses on the principles of law in the global context, with a special emphasis on the Rule of Law, citizenship, and the enforcement of EU values. Outside of CEU Dimitry is Visiting Professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome (Faculty of Law). In the Spring semester of 2025 he is also a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at the Centre of Comparative and Public Law at Hong Kong University.