Christiana Ochoa

Associate Professor of Law

Office: 257
Phone: 812-856-1516
E-mail: cochoa@indiana.edu

B.A. 1993, University of Michigan; J.D. 1998, Harvard. Editor-in-Chief Harvard Human Rights Journal; Attorney, Clifford Chance, 1999-2001; Visiting Professor and Researcher, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, 1998-99.

Before joining the faculty in 2003, Professor Ochoa was an associate in the Banking and Finance Group at the New York office of the global law firm, Clifford Chance, where she dedicated her efforts to cross-border capital markets and asset-backed finance transactions. Ochoa has also worked for a number of human rights and non-governmental organizations in Colombia, Brazil, and Nicaragua. She has lived for extended periods in Latin America and has significant academic and other work experience in that region.

Ochoa's scholarship focuses on global governance and human rights. Her work has been published in the Harvard International Law Journal, the Virginia Journal of International Law, the Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2008) and the Human Rights Quarterly, among others. Her research concentrates in two inter-connected areas: the role of individuals in law-formation and the inextricable links between global economic activity and human rights. The first of these concentrations explores the relationship between the evolving role of individuals in global governance and under international law and the doctrinal role of individuals in international law formation. Ochoa's more recent work in this area examines the individual's participation in law formation and in civil society as means to increasing the democratic legitimacy of international law and global governance mechanisms. Her work on global economic activity and human rights has included the development of what she terms the Odious Finance Doctrine as well as inquiries into the complex interconnections between the proliferation of finance tools and human rights.

Selected Publications:

Cosmopolitan Activity and the Implementation of Gender Equality Frameworks, CONSTITUTING EQUALITY: GENDER EQUALITY AND COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (Susan Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
From Odious Debt to Odious Finance: Avoiding the Externalities of a Functional Odious Debt Doctrine, 49 HARV. INT'L. L. J. 109 (2008).
Guatemala's Global Feminism and its Effects on the Guatemalan Constitution, 83 INDIANA LAW JOURNAL___ (2008, forthcoming).
The Relationship of Participatory Democracy to Participatory Law Making, 15 IND. J. GLOBAL LEGAL STUD. __ (2008, forthcoming).
The Individual and Customary International Law Formation, 48 VIRGINIA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 119, (2007).
Towards a Cosmopolitan Vision of International Law: Identifying and Defining CIL Post Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 74 U. CIN. L. REV. 105 (2006).
Access to U.S. Federal Courts as a Forum for Human Rights Disputes: Pluralism and the Alien Tort Claims Act, 12 IND. J. GLOBAL LEGAL STUD. 631 (2005).
Advancing the Language of Human Rights in a Global Economic Order: An Analysis of a Discourse, 23 B.C. THIRD WORLD L.J. 57 (2003).
Comparación de negociaciones de paz en conflictos políticos y étnicos: los casos de Irelanda del Norte y de España [Comparison of Peace Negotiations in Ethnic and Political Conflicts: The Cases of Northern Ireland and Spain], in LA OTRA GUERRA: EL DERECHO COMO CONTINUACIÓN DEL CONFLICTO Y LENGUAJE DE LA PAZ 271 (Rivera et al. eds., 1998).

View Professor Ochoa's curriculum vitae [PDF], complete bibliography, and research at the Social Science Research Network.

Teaching and Research Interests

Courses

Contracts I (B501)
Contracts II (B502)
Corporate Finance Law (B656)
International Business Transactions (B735)
International Human Rights (B793)
Seminar in Human Rights (L793)
Contracts (B501)

Current Teaching

Fall 2008 - 2009

Contracts (B501)
Contracts (B501)
International Law (B665)
Law Journal: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (B674)
Law Journal: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (B674)

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