Hila Shamir is a Professor of Law (on leave) at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. She earned an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University. Shamir teaches and researches in the fields of Employment, Labor, Immigration, and Welfare Law with a focus on issues of human trafficking, gender equality, informal work, and the law of global value chains. Shamir has taught at Toronto Faculty of Law, Notre Dame Law School, University of Toronto Law School, Georgetown Law School, UC Berkeley, Cornell Law School, and at the Harvard University Department of Government, and was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley (2014-16). She is currently the Chair of Transnational Law at the European University Institute, Florence School of Transnational Governance.
Shamir served as Associate Dean of Academic and student Affairs at TAU Law (2017-18). She received two European Research Council (ERC) research grants. The first, to pursue research on a Labor Approach to Human Trafficking (TraffLab, 2018-2023), seeking to shift anti-trafficking policy, research and discourse, away from the predominant criminal law, border control, and human rights model, and towards a labor based approach to human trafficking that will be primarily focused on the bargaining power disparities that create vulnerability to trafficking. Her research was nominated as a finalist for the ERC Public Engagement with Research Award 2022. The second, Labor Law for a Global Value Chain Economy (ChainGE Lab, 2024-2029) sets to explore pathways to adapt labor law and workers’ rights protections to the challenges of supply chain capitalism. Shamir is also the recipient of the Fattal Prize for excellence in legal research (2022), the Cheshin Prize for Academic Excellence in Law for Young Scholar (2018), the Zeltner Prize for Excellence in Research for Junior Legal Scholars (2014). She also received several grants including an EU Marie Curie Reintegration Grant, the Alon Scholarship for outstanding junior faculty, and research grants from the Israeli Science Foundation and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology, and a Fulbright fellowship. Shamir was a member of the Israeli Young Academy (2018-2022).
Prior to her graduate studies Shamir served as a law clerk to Justice E. Mazza of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her publications include the books Governance Feminism: An Introduction (2018, Minnesota U. Press) and Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (2019, Minnesota U. Press), the first co-authored and the second co-edited with Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran and Rachel Rebouche; in 2025 she published an edited volume, in Cambridge University Press, on “Modern Slavery and Global Value Chains” (2025), co-edited with Tamar Barkay, Shilpi Benerjee and Bimal Aurora.
