Ludmilla Martins da Silva is a JSD candidate and Interim Teaching Fellow for the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies (SPILS). Her research agenda focuses on private antitrust enforcement and the rule of law.

Her work in antitrust law examines the institutional and legislative framework governing competition damage claims. Drawing on five years of litigation experience in Brazil, she brings a practical perspective to her scholarship, having represented victims in some of the country’s first individual and collective competition damage cases. She has also assisted in private antitrust cases filed in Europe. In her JSD research, she examines private antitrust enforcement in the United States, focusing on litigation strategies and enforcement gaps. More specifically, she explores the duality between the prevalence of private enforcement and the concurrent retrenchment of antitrust and civil procedure doctrines. Building on interviews, she investigates how lawyers select new antitrust cases and how such mechanisms affect the outreach of antitrust enforcement.

Her research interests also include how judicial actors safeguard democratic principles and the factors influencing their performance. She co-authored papers such as “Militant Democracy Stages a Comeback to Brazil” (Lawfare), “How Latin American Judges are Protecting Democracy” (Journal of Democracy), and “Informal Norms in Judicial Selection” (forthcoming in The American Journal of Comparative Law).

Ludmilla is also involved in the Private Antitrust Remedies Policy Practicum, a pioneering empirical project that maps the non-monetary remedies requested and obtained in private antitrust actions filed in U.S. federal courts.

She holds a JSM from Stanford Law School, a postgraduate degree (with distinction) in Economic Law from Fundação Getulio Vargas, and a Bachelor of Law (JD equivalent) from the University of São Paulo. She was a recipient of the 2024-25 Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship for academic excellence and leadership potential.