Kish Parella Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and Law

Email: parellak@wlu.edu

Office: 483 Lewis Hall 

SSRN • CV  •  Publications & Research  •  High Res Photo

Area of Expertise

International Business Transactions, Corporate Governance, Contracts.

Education

BA, University of Western Ontario

MPhil, University of Cambridge

JD, Duke Law School

LLM, Duke Law School

About

Professor Kish Parella's teaching and research interests are in international business transactions. She teaches business associations, contracts, corporate compliance, international business transactions, and corporate social responsibility. In 2024, the W&L Law Student Bar Association awarded her "Faculty Member of the Year." Her scholarship explores the intersection between corporate governance and international law, including board governance of human rights and the contract design of supply chain contracts. Her current research focuses on geopolitics, national security and corporate law and examines international contracting and global supply chain resilience in emerging technologies, such as Bitcoin mining.

Professor Parella takes a global approach to exploring international business transactions. She was appointed to the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) as a Research Member and to the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation (Saïd Business School, Oxford University) as an International Research Fellow. She also serves on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. In August 2025, she will serve as a Visiting Scholar at the Singapore Management University, Yong Pung How School of Law. She previously served as a Visiting Scholar at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg).

Professor Parella is the organizer of several initiatives in the field of international business transactions. She organizes a virtual seminar series in international business transactions that features scholars, practitioners, industry experts, and policymakers from around the world. She also organized two regional roundtables (Washington, DC and London, UK) on the intersection between international business and national security. In March 2025, she co-organized the Berle XVII corporate governance conference at Seattle University School of Law on "International Business Transactions in a Fragmented World: National Security, Geopolitics and Corporate Governance."

Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Alabama Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Boston University School of Law, Vanderbilt Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, UC Irvine Law Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, the American Business Law Journal, and the Journal of International Economic Law, among others. Three of her articles were selected for presentation at the Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in consecutive years (2017, 2018, 2019). In addition, her article, "Protecting Third Parties in Contracts," was awarded the Ralph Hoeber Award for Excellence in Research by the American Business Law Journal and the Academy of Legal Studies in Business.

Professor Parella is a leading expert on business and human rights. She has advised government officials, investor advocates, corporate executives, and UN working groups on various issues of business and human rights. She served on the Board of Directors for Corporate Accountability Lab, a non-profit organization dedicated to using legal strategies to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Global Business & Human Rights Scholars Association. Professor Parella also served as a Co-Chair of the 2022 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law.

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 at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP where her clients were multinational and sovereign entities engaged in complex disputes before U.S. courts and international tribunals.

Podcasts and Media

• "Corporate Foreign Policy in War" on the Business Scholarship Podcast (February 20, 2023)
• "Negligent Contracts" on the Private Law Podcast (June 8, 2021)
• "Business and Human Rights" on the Business Scholarship Podcast (January 28, 2021)

Recent Scholarship

"The Human Rights Obligations of Corporate Directors," UC Irvine Law Review (forthcoming 2026)

"Corporate Governance and International Law," Alabama Law Review (2024)

"Enforcing International Law Against Corporations," Harvard International Law Journal (2024)

"Corporate Foreign Policy in War," Boston College Law Review (2023).

"International Law in the Boardroom," Cornell Law Review (2023)

"Contractual Stakeholderism," Boston University Law Review (2022)

- See Prof. Parella's full list of publications at her Publications & Research page.