Elena Chachko

Elena Chachko (SJD 22’) is the inaugural Rappaport Fellow at Harvard Law School. She is also an academic fellow at the Miller Center for Global Challenges and the Law at Berkeley Law School. Her work explores how insights from administrative law and theory can illuminate novel structural developments in domestic foreign affairs and national security practices, as well as the behavior of international institutions. Elena’s current projects study the security and geopolitical aspects of tech governance, how U.S. domestic regulators incorporate international factors and the incoherent administrative law and foreign relations law frameworks that govern this work, the emergency powers of international institutions, and the rise of targeted economic warfare in international relations. She has also worked on policy diffusion in the context of responsibility sharing for refugees and asylum seekers. Her work combines theoretical and empirical approaches.

Elena’s scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the American Journal of International Law, the Yale Journal of International Law, and the Stanford Technology Law Review, among other publications. She has also published widely in venues such as Lawfare, Just Security, the Regulatory Review, and the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice & Comment. Her research has won several awards, including the 2020 Mike Lewis Prize for national security law scholarship, the Harvard Law School Irving Oberman constitutional law writing prize, and the Harvard Law School Mancini writing prize. Elena previously held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, and the Harvard Weatherhead Center. She received her SJD from Harvard Law School, and an LLB in law and international relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.