Laura M Bingham

Laura Bingham, J.D., M.A., directs the Institute for Law, Innovation, and Technology, based at Temple Law School. Working with faculty from across the law school and Temple University, she designs and executes the strategic direction, associated curriculum, research, and programming of the center.

Laura is a globally recognized expert on nationality and migration law and human rights and joins Temple after extensive experience in international human rights litigation.

As a legal practitioner, Laura has led complex investigations and transnational human rights litigation in every major regional system as well as many national courts. Representative matters include a landmark ruling on children’s right to nationality, legal personality, and effective remedies in Zhao v. The Netherlands before the U.N. Human Rights Committee (2020); a judgment nullifying the roll-out of a national biometric digital identification program for failure to respect the right to privacy (Kenyan High Court, 2021); a significant monetary award for members of six Roma families whose village was unlawfully razed by Russian authorities (European Court of Human Rights, 2018); and a groundbreaking decision from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the arbitrary denial of nationality in Anudo v. Tanzania (2018).

Prior to joining Temple, Laura served as senior managing legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative. She established and led a global program on data, technology, and human rights, which covered content moderation and hate speech, equity and non-discrimination, the right to privacy, data governance, and digital transformation of state and private services. She also managed teams working on global migration, nationality law, and structural discrimination. Beginning in 2020, Laura created and co-managed an organization-wide fund on digital identification, and served on the steering committee of a campaign on global health, technology and surveillance during Covid-19.

Laura has written and contributed to stories on a range of legal issue from major technical and general audience publications, including World Politics Review, The Intercept, The New York Times, Just Security, and IEEE Spectrum. Recent longform publications include Unmaking Americans: Insecurity Citizenship in the United States (2019), Human Rights in the Context of Automatic Naturalization in Crimea (2018), and Documenting Citizenship and other Forms of Legal Identity: A Community-Based Practitioner’s Guide (2018). She also co-authored the Principles on Deprivation of Nationality as a National Security Measure (2020), and accompanying legal commentary, which are endorsed by more than a hundred eminent legal scholars and civil society organizations from around the world.

Since 2017, Laura has taught courses on human rights and forced migration as an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. She has also lectured, spoken, and taught around the world on human rights, strategic litigation practice, equality law, law and technology, and migration and nationality law.