Dr. Leila Faghfouri Azar is a lecturer and researcher in legal theory at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam. Her expertise lies in critical legal theory, decolonial approaches to law and justice, and the abolition struggles against violence, exploitation, and inequality. She holds a PhD in Legal Theory from the University of Amsterdam and has studied Philosophy (MA, Leiden University), International Human Rights Law (LLM, National Iranian University), and Law and Jurisprudence (LLB, University of Tehran). She has also completed postgraduate training in Socio-Legal Theory at the University of Oxford and held a research fellowship at the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University.

Research
Dr. Faghfouri Azar’s research investigates how law, shaped by politico-economic historical developments, produces Outcast communities and how these communities resist and seek to abolish legally normalised structures of dispossession and exploitation. This inquiry unfolds along two main lines of her research. The first line examines late-capitalist structures of severe exploitation and servitude against illegalised migrants in Europe from a legal-philosophical perspective. The second line examines how indigenous resistance movements in the Middle East challenge capitalist–patriarchal systems of violence and dispossession. She is affiliated with the Research Priority Area Decolonial Futures and has been awarded two Seed Grants for projects aligned with these research themes.

Teaching
Dr. Faghfouri Azar teaches and supervises thesis across a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary subjects at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Her teachings include the BA courses History of Legal Theory, Critical Legal Analysis, Slavery and Abolition: An Ongoing Struggle for Liberation, and Securitisation of Migration in Europe: Border, Race and Class. She also teaches the PhD course Theory and Methods of Legal Research.