Leila Faghfouri Azar is a researcher in legal theory at the Paul Scholten Centre for Jurisprudence and teaches law and politics courses at the PPLE College. Her main areas of research interest include critical legal theory, law and inequality, law and violence, Marxist legal theory, irregular migration and human rights theory. Leila's current research examines late capitalist structures of severe exploitation against irregular migrants in Europe from a legal-philosophical standpoint.

Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Leila earned an LLB in Jurisprudence from the University of Tehran and an LLM in International Human Rights Law from the Iranian National University. She received her second Master's degree in Philosophy from Leiden University for which she was awarded the Platinum Excellence Scholarship (LexS). Leila also completed a one-year postgraduate level program in Socio-Legal Theory at the University of Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in addition to a one-year research fellowship appointment at the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University.