Natalia Brigagão is an Alfred Landecker DPhil Scholar and Case Writer (Case Centre on Public Leadership). Her work on human rights and social justice lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy and critical legal theory. Empirically informed, it takes seriously what advocates and social movements teach us about justice—and their role in bringing it about.

Natalia is developing a normative account of human rights as resources against oppression. Responding to disillusionment with human rights and concerns about their entanglement in domination, she argues that human rights are neither inherently emancipatory nor hopelessly captive to the structures they purport to challenge. Her work therefore asks not whether human rights should be vindicated or abandoned, but under what conditions they can empower struggles against oppression—and how normative theory, itself political, can strengthen these possibilities.
This interest in how struggle gives normative ideals force also shaped Natalia's research on human dignity. Focusing on Brazil, she traced how dignity emerged as a constitutional principle through struggles for democracy and socioeconomic rights, acquiring distinctive meaning and legal force as resource for those pursuing justice. This work received the Brazilian Academy of Constitutional Law's Monograph Award (2018) and appeared in the American Journal of Legal History.

Natalia has contributed to human rights advocacy, policy, and litigation. As Brazil Lead for the UPR Project, she led a submission to the UN on the rights of incarcerated mothers and pregnant women alongside British and Brazilian scholars. Earlier, as Coordinator of Brazil’s Human Rights Lab, she transformed an inactive research group into a nationally recognised centre awarded the Patricia Acioli Prize (2021). There, she trained 100+ grassroots advocates and led an amicus intervention urging the IACtHR to recognise socioeconomic gender inequality as a form of discrimination—an argument it embraced in a landmark precedent. Natalia has also served as an Adviser to Brazil at the UN, held the Victor Nunes Leal Chair at the Brazilian Supreme Court, contributed research to UN and IACHR Rapporteurs, and consulted for the International Commission of Jurists.

Natalia has nearly a decade of experience teaching law and political theory at institutions like Stanford, Oxford, and Birmingham City University, where she convened a research methods course and supervised dissertations. At Blavatnik, she has lectured, led seminars, and co-developed curriculum for Foundations, the MPP's core political philosophy module. Her teaching has received outstanding evaluations, with students praising her ability to make complex ideas accessible without sacrificing rigour, the balance she strikes between challenging and supporting them, and her exceptional commitment to their intellectual development.

These same commitments inform Natalia's work at the Case Centre, where she works alongside faculty to design teaching materials for Oxford and beyond. Her problem-posing, dialogical pedagogy invites students to grapple with real-world dilemmas, learning with and from one another as they think critically through complex problems.

Natalia completed an MJur at Oxford as a Kofi Annan Scholar and graduated first in her class with an LLB from UFU, Brazil. She was previously a Visiting Student at Harvard.