Thiago Nascimento dos Reis is a Lecturer and the Teaching Fellow for the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies (SPILS). He holds an LLB from the University of São Paulo and JSM and JSD degrees from Stanford University. Thiago is a legal empiricist focused on bridging the gap between quantitative analyses and international human rights law through studies that shed light on states’ compliance with their international commitments and on the potential or actual effectiveness of legal reforms from a human rights perspective. Thiago’s JSD dissertation investigates the Brazilian pretrial criminal decision-making through a series of inferential and predictive quantitative analyses relying on a tailor-made dataset including over 2,000 defendant-level observations from a large Brazilian city. This inquiry built on the qualitative work he performed for his SPILS thesis, which was awarded the Carl Mason Franklin Award in International Law.

Previously, Thiago was a corporate associate of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City and worked for two years with antitrust and trade law at a São Paulo-based law firm. Thiago clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rwanda in 2016 and was a research assistant at Fundação Getulio Vargas and Harvard Business School.

Key Research Areas:

• Criminal Procedure
• International Human Rights
• Empirical Legal Studies
• Comparative Law