Biography
Hila Shamir is Chair of Transnational Law at the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute. She is Professor of Law (on leave) at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.
Shamir’s research examines the changing world of work and the ways in which law shapes the distribution of power and resources in labour markets. Her work brings together labour and employment law, migration and welfare law, transnational law, feminist legal thought, and critical legal theory to study issues such as gendered informal labour, human trafficking, and workers’ rights in global value chains. A central concern of her research is how legal institutions shape distributive outcomes along the lines of class, gender, and national status, and how and whether they can be reconstituted to advance greater equality. Her work is particularly concerned with forms of work and production that extend beyond the conventional boundaries of the employment relationship and the nation state.
She is currently Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant ChainGE: A New Labour Law for Supply Chain Capitalism (2024–2029. www.chaingelab.org ). The project examines how labour law and labour governance can be reimagined to strengthen workers’ rights and power in global value chains. From 2018 to 2023, she was Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded TraffLab: Human Trafficking – A Labour Perspective (www.trafflab.org), which developed a labour based approach to human trafficking focused on the structural conditions and bargaining power disparities that produce vulnerability to severe labour exploitation. TraffLab was a finalist for the 2022 ERC Public Engagement with Research Award.
Shamir received her S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and her LL.B., magna cum laude, from Tel Aviv University. She has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School, Notre Dame Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Georgetown Law, UC Berkeley, and Cornell Law School. Before entering academia, she clerked for Justice Eliyahu Mazza of the Supreme Court of Israel and practiced law in Boston.
Her publications include Governance Feminism: An Introduction (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), co-authored with Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, and Rachel Rebouché, and the co-edited volume Modern Slavery and Global Value Chains (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her recent work focuses on labour governance, worker power, and collective action in global value chains, including research on human rights due diligence, worker-driven governance, strike law, and new forms of transnational labour regulation.
She is currently working with Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee, Minju Kang, Trang Tran, and Rahul S on the co-authored book manuscript Reforging the Chain: Labour Power and Law in Supply Chain Capitalism. The book asks how labour law can be reconfigured for supply chain capitalism, with particular attention to the institutions and strategies through which workers can build collective power across fragmented and transnational structures of production.