Leigha is an American legal scholar specializing in constitutional law, comparative constitutionalism, human rights, and transnational legal networks. She serves as an Assistant Professor of Law at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, while maintaining a role as a nonresident fellow at Stanford Law School’s Neukom Center for the Rule of Law. She holds a Master’s degree in International Development from Cornell University and both a J.D. and an LL.M. (magna cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame Law School, alongside doctoral research at King’s College London.
Her academic and empirical research explores how constitutional structures adapt to global pressures and the ways democratic frameworks maintain systemic resilience. Before joining the faculty at DePaul, she built extensive international and comparative legal experience, serving as a Senior C.V. Starr Lecturer in transnational legal practice and comparative law at Peking University’s School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China. She has also held institutional appointments as a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and a research associate with the University of Oxford’s China, Law and Development Project. Her recent scholarship investigates historical litigation models and rule-of-law adaptations within modern courts.