Professor Kish Parella, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Kish Parella teaches courses at the intersection of law and business, including contracts, international business transactions, and corporate social responsibility. Her research is in international economic law, with a focus on the cross-border regulation of corporations and other non-state actors. She explores the information functions of domestic and international legal institutions and the effects of information on organizational conduct and private ordering. Her current research examines the different types of reputational costs imposed on organizations (public and private) by civil litigation, government investigation, and international dispute resolution, including how those costs incentivize organizations to improve their practices.
Professor Parella’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Duke Law Journal, Washington Law Review, and leading international law journals, among others. Her research has been selected for presentation at the Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2017), Annual Research Forum of the American Society of International Law (2014, 2015, 2016), and Society for Environmental Law and Economics (2017). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Scholarship and the Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law Southeast Interest Group.
Before joining the faculty of Washington and Lee, Professor Parella was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University School of Law where she taught contracts and international arbitration. Prior to entering the legal academy, Professor Parella practiced international litigation and arbitration in the Washington, D.C. office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP where her clients were multinational and sovereign entities engaged in complex disputes before U.S. courts and international tribunals. Professor Parella graduated from Duke Law School, where she served as an articles editor of Duke Law Journal. She specialized in international law with a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, England and a LL.M. in International & Comparative Law from Duke Law School. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.