Biography
Monica Arango Olaya is a socio-legal scholar specialising in constitutional law, international human rights law, and law and technology. Her work critically explores how rights are conceived, mobilised, and contested within courts, through legal systems, and by transnational social movements. Across these three research streams, she applies a sustained focus on gender, legal mobilisation, and social movements.
She holds a DPhil in Law from the University of Oxford. Her thesis, Digital Feminism in India, examined how digital activism reshaped justice claims for sexual harassment, transformed legal consciousness, and influenced governance practices during India’s #MeToo movement. Monica also earned an LLM from Harvard University and an LLB from the University of Los Andes in Colombia.
Prior to her doctoral studies, she served as Deputy Justice at the Colombian Constitutional Court, contributing to key rulings on equality, reproductive rights, and transitional justice. She was also Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Centre for Reproductive Rights, where she opened and led the Bogotá Office. At Oxford, she was a Graduate Research Resident at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and collaborated with the Oxford Human Rights Hub.
As a Max Weber Fellow, Monica will investigate how reproductive rights litigation in Latin America informs constitutional recognition of uncodified rights, engaging with theories of living constitutionalism and responsive law.