Kish Parella Associate Professor of Law

Phone: 540-458-8331

Email: parellak@wlu.edu

Office: 465 Lewis Hall 

CV  •  Scholarly Commons  •  High Res Photo

Area of Expertise

International Economic Law, Organizational Theory, Corporate Social Responsibility

Education

BA, University of Western Ontario

MPhil, University of Cambridge

JD, Duke Law School

LLM, Duke Law School

About

Professor Kish Parella teaches courses at the intersection of law and business, including contracts, international business transactions, and corporate social responsibility. Her research is in international economic law, with a focus on the cross-border governance of corporations.  Her current research examines the interaction between law and reputational mechanisms to improve corporate conduct in global supply chains.

Professor Parella's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Duke Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Washington Law Review, and leading international law journals, among others.  Three of her recent papers ("Reputational Regulation," "Public Relations Litigation," and "Improving Social Compliance in Supply Chains,") have been selected for presentation at the Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in consecutive years (2017, 2018, 2019).  She has also been invited to present her research at the Annual Research Forum of the American Society of International Law, and the annual meetings of the American Law & Economics Association and the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics. She has been awarded the Law School's Ethan Allen Faculty Fellowship for Scholarship and Lewis Prize for Excellence in Legal Scholarship by the Francis Lewis Center.

Professor Parella is a member of the Board of Directors for the Global Business & Human Rights Scholars Association and a member of the Editorial Board for the Business & Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press).

Before joining the faculty of Washington and Lee, Professor Parella was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova University School of Law where she taught contracts and international arbitration. Prior to entering the legal academy, Professor Parella practiced international litigation and arbitration in the Washington, D.C. office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP where her clients were multinational and sovereign entities engaged in complex disputes before U.S. courts and international tribunals. Professor Parella graduated from Duke Law School, where she served as an articles editor of Duke Law Journal. She specialized in international law with a Master of Philosophy in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, England and a LL.M. in International & Comparative Law from Duke Law School. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario, Canada.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Parella is visiting at Boston University School of Law. 

Recent Scholarship

Improving Social Compliance in Supply Chains, Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 95, Issue 2 (2019)

Public Relations Litigation, Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 72, Issue 4 (2019)  

Reputational Regulation, 67 Duke L. J., Vol. 67, Issue 5 (2018)  

Treaty Penumbras, 38 U. Pa. J. Int'l L. 275 (2017)  

The Stewardship of Trust in the Global Value Chain, 56 Va. J. Int'L 585 (2017)  

Outsourcing Corporate Accountability, 89 Washington L. Rev. 747 (2014)

- See Prof. Parella's full list of publications at her Scholarly Commons page.