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Omer Ein-Habar

S.J.D. Candidate

oeinhabar at sjd.law.harvard.edu

Dissertation

The Infrastructure of City Power: Essays on the Public Provision of Basic Needs

My research asks whether local democracy can be understood apart from the infrastructure that sustains it. Local government law typically treats democracy as a matter of participation and representation; The Infrastructure of City Power complicates this view by taking local infrastructure and utilities as constitutive of democratic power, rather than mere technical background. Water offers a particularly clear case: unlike most other local utilities, it resisted privatization throughout the twentieth century, a divergence whose legal and institutional history reveals what is materially at stake in local self-government.

Fields of Research and Supervisors

  • Law and Political Economy of Networks, Platforms, and Utilities with Professor Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School, Principal Faculty Supervisor
  • State and Local Government with Professor Maureen E. Brady, Harvard Law School
  • Legal Geography with Professor Lucie E. White, Harvard Law School
  • Water Law, Management, and Policy with Professor James Salzman, UCLA School of Law

Additional Research Interests

  • Property Law
  • Legislation and Regulation
  • Federalism
  • Networks, Platforms, and Utilities

Education

  • Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2023 – Present
  • Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program 2022-2023 (requirements fulfilled, degree waived)
  • Tel Aviv University, LL.B. 2020

Representative Publications

Omer Ein Habar & Guy Priver, Art Without Boundaries? The Museum as a Local Institution, 46 Tau L. Rev. F. (2023) (Heb.)

Omer Ein Habar, Aya Omassi, Adan Tatour, The Moral Commitment of Law Students and Law Reviews, 43(2) TAU. L. REV. 287 (2020) (Heb.).

Additional Information

Languages: English, Hebrew

Last Updated: September 23, 2026