Ayelet Berman at GAL seminar

Ayelet Berman, PhD student in International Law at the Institute, was awarded the 2011 Global Administrative Law (GAL) Project’s Cassese-Stewart Prize for her research paper entitled "The Role of Domestic Administrative Law in the Accountability of Transnational Regulatory Networks".

Ms Berman was presented the best paper prize at the GAL Seminar on "Private and Public-Private Global Regulation: Global Administrative Law Dimensions", in Viterbo, Italy, in June. “I am surprised and honoured to have received this prestigious prize”, she said. “I did not have any indication in advance that I would be given the award”.

Ms Berman said she believes her paper was picked because it best interpreted the Global Administrative Law Project spirit and best adopted its approach, dealing with both horizontal (global networks and global institutions) and vertical (implications for national administration) dimensions of global administrative law. “I used domestic administrative law as a tool to assess global phenomena”, she said.

The paper incorporated work Ms Berman conducted as a research assistant at the Graduate Institute’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) project on "Informal International Law-Making: Mapping the Action and Testing Concepts of Accountability and Effectiveness" otherwise known as IN-LAW. The research is also an integral part of her PhD thesis on "The Accountability of Transnational Regulatory Networks", she said. 

The IN-LAW project aims to examine the phenomena of informal international law making and to understand the democratic accountability problems related with it, seeking to increase accountability in a way that does not undermine effectiveness. It is led by Joost Pauwelyn, Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute and co-Director of its Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, with the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and the University of Twente. IN-LAW is funded by the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL).

Ayelet Berman is a Swiss and Israeli national and is in the third year of the PhD in International Law programme with her research being supervised by Professor Pauwelyn.

The Global Administrative Law Project, based at New York University, focuses on the increasing use of administrative law-type mechanisms related to transparency, participation, accountability and review, within the regulatory institutions of global governance.