Katerina Linos teaches international business transactions, international law, European Union law, and international organizations.
She is best known for her research on the diffusion of ideas around the world. Her book “The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries” won three national awards. She documents that laws don’t spread only through expert networks, but also through popular movements. Politicians can win elections by advocating for tried-and-true, mainstream models. Therefore, the same law is often adopted around the world, even in countries for which it is a poor fit.
Linos also studies how information and misinformation shape refugee and migration law. Through a Carnegie fellowship, she studied how government and international organization reticence allows for misinformation to spread among migrants, opening up space for rights violations and smuggling. In Digital Refuge, Linos presents the European refugee crisis from the perspective of migrants, drawing on thousands of interviews and Facebook posts. In Responsibility Sharing or Responsibility Dumping? she evaluates both progressive and conservative innovations in refugee law.
