S.J.D. Candidate
yjin at sjd.law.harvard.edu
Dissertation
Rights Without Redistribution
This project reconstructs the making of the two-Covenant structure of international human rights law between 1945 and the late 1970s as a lens onto the consolidation of an anti-redistributive orientation in U.S. constitutional politics. It traces the formation of the postwar international human rights architecture, with particular attention to the separation of the negative civil-political rights from the positive socio-economic rights. By excavating the treaty-making process, it traces how the United States, as a consequential participant in postwar human rights treaty negotiations, carried a constrained domestic conception of equal protection into the formation of the bifurcated international human rights regime.
This bifurcation, in turn, illuminates a longer trajectory in U.S. constitutional politics in which the redistributive possibilities associated with New Deal liberalism were narrowed across the postwar decades. The project situates U.S. human rights diplomacy against a domestic backdrop marked by the Cold War marginalization of labor radicalism, racialized attacks on the welfare state, and the fracture of the redistributive coalition that had sustained New Deal liberalism, even as the Warren Court briefly engaged poverty and minimum subsistence as constitutional concerns. As the civil rights movement destabilized the racial compromises on which that coalition had depended, race became a political mechanism for reorganizing opposition to redistribution. By the 1970s, this realignment had enabled the ascendancy of a resurgent anti-New Deal political coalition, which recast anti-redistributive politics in constitutional terms through formal equality. These developments solidified the imaginative boundaries of constitutional equality in the United States around claims increasingly detached from redistribution, with implications for the structure and limits of rights on a global scale.
Fields of Research and Supervisors
- American Constitutional Law and History with Professor Michael J. Klarman, Harvard Law School, Principal Faculty Supervisor
- Law and Political Economy with Professor Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School
- History of International Law with Professor Idriss Fofana, Harvard Law School
- Comparative Law and Legal History with Professor William P. Alford, Harvard Law School
Additional Research Interests
- Constitutional Law
- Race, Equal Protection and Economic Justice
- Labor Law and the First Amendment
- Gender and the Law
- Comparative Constitutional Law
Education
- Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate, 2025-Present
- Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program, 2024-2025 (requirements fulfilled, degree waived)
Academic Appointments and Fellowships
- Harvard Law School, 2024-26, F.Y. Chang Scholar
Last Updated: April 28, 2026