Migration and Misinformation

Katerina Linos is the Irving G. and Eleanor D. Tragen Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches international business transactions, international law, European Union law, and international organizations.

She is best known for her research on the diffusion of ideas around the world. Her book The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How Health, Family and Employment Laws Spread Across Countries won three national awards. She documents that laws don’t spread only through expert networks, but also through popular movements. Politicians can win elections by advocating for tried-and-true, mainstream models. Therefore, the same law is often adopted around the world, even in countries for which it is a poor fit.

Linos also studies how information and misinformation shape refugee and migration law.  Through a Carnegie fellowship, she studied how government and international organization reticence allows for misinformation to spread among migrants, opening up space for rights violations and smuggling. In Digital Refuge, Linos presents the European refugee crisis from the perspective of migrants, drawing on thousands of interviews and Facebook posts. In Responsibility Sharing or Responsibility Dumping? she evaluates both progressive and conservative innovations in refugee law.  

Linos has researched how the media translate US Supreme Court opinions; how public opinion cleavages form around the world; how the European Union influences legislation not only through compliance mechanisms, but also through diffusion processes; and how UN General Assembly templates shape the design of institutions around the world.

Linos’ research is empirical and focused on developing and applying new qualitative and quantitative methods. Her work appears in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the California Law Review, the Chicago Law Review, Comparative Political Studies, the European Sociological Review, and International Organization. Linos is the host of the international law podcast Borderlines.