Meet our 2009-10 post doctoral fellows.


Nicole Hassoun
Nicole is an assistant professor in philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's Program on International Relations and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh.

Nicole writes primarily in political philosophy and ethics and focuses, in particular, on global economic and environmental justice. She is also interested in methodological issues in philosophy and the other social sciences. Her articles appear in journals such as the American Philosophical Quarterly, Public Affairs Quarterly, Environmental Ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, and Utilitas.

During her time at Stanford, Nicole plans to extend her research on basic needs and globalization to questions about international trade and population health. She will consider, for instance, what light good ethical principles throw on the World Trade Organization’s Trade Related International Property Rights, Sanitary and Phytosanitary, Technical Barriers to Trade, and (potential) service agreements. 



Allegra McLeod
Allegra received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, Allegra clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and served as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow providing pro bono representation to immigrants detained at the California-Mexico border. As a Liman Fellow, Allegra also conducted research on the intersections of U.S. criminal and immigration policies. 

Allegra’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Exporting U.S. Criminal Justice: Crime, Development, and Empire After the Cold War," addressed the globalization of U.S. criminal procedural and transnational crime control models. In her dissertation, she systematically examined the range of U.S. government programs engaged in foreign criminal justice reform, the functions these programs fulfilled in terms of fashioning a regime for global governance and neoliberal restructuring during the 1990s and beyond, and their not infrequently devastating effects on the ground in recipient locations. 

As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, Allegra will work to revise and publish her dissertation manuscript, and will continue her research on the criminalization of migration policy and criminal justice and development. She will split her time between the Program on Global Justice and Center for Ethics in Society and will co-teach the course Introduction to Global Justice.



Kieran Oberman
A graduate of Oxford University, Kieran is currently based at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium as a fellow in the Chaire Hoover program. This program aims to stimulate ethical reflection in teaching and research of the University’s Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Studies.

Kieran’s research focuses on the ethical implications of international migration. His thesis, "Immigration and Freedom of Movement," argued that people have a human right to freedom of movement that entails a right to cross borders. He conceded, however, that there might be extreme circumstances under which immigration restrictions could be justified.

In his post-doctoral work at Stanford, Kieran will consider this question of justified restrictions in more detail by focussing on the particular issue of medical brain drain from developing countries. Another area of research will be the treatment of migrants after they have arrived within their state of destination, considering, for instance, whether migrants must be granted equal rights to citizens and if so after how long and under what conditions. The research in these areas will be the basis for Kieran’s future book project on the ethics of immigration policy.

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2008-09 Post Doctoral Fellows