Yüksel Sezgin, Affiliated Faculty by Courtesy Appointment

 Yüksel Sezgin is Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Syracuse University, where he serves as O'Hanley Faculty Scholar and directs both the Law, Society and Policy Program and the Pre-Law Program in Europe. 

A comparative legal scholar, his research examines how judges reason, how courts resolve disputes involving legal and normative pluralism, and how emerging technologies are transforming judicial decision-making. His current research focuses on the comparative governance of artificial intelligence in courts, exploring how AI is reshaping judicial reasoning, adjudication, access to justice, procedural fairness, and institutional legitimacy across diverse legal systems. 

Sezgin's first book,  Human Rights under State-Enforced Religious Family Laws (Cambridge University Press, 2013), was based on twenty-seven months of fieldwork in Israel, Egypt, and India, and 185 interviews with members of twenty ethnoreligious communities. Winner of the American Sociological Association's Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, the book demonstrates how state enforcement of Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu family laws can produce systematic human rights violations while revealing the remarkably similar strategies individuals employ across different legal systems to defend their rights. 

His most recent book,  Judging through Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2026), examines how civil judges in Israel, Greece, India, and Ghana adjudicate Muslim family law. Drawing on more than twenty months of fieldwork (2013–2022), nearly 400 interviews with judges, lawyers, and litigants, and content analysis of more than 3,000 judicial decisions in five languages, the book develops a theory of judicial narratives to explain how judges construct legal authority, negotiate competing normative frameworks, and shape the evolution of minority rights through adjudication. This work provides the empirical and theoretical foundation for his current research on the comparative governance of AI in courts, examining how generative AI is transforming judicial reasoning, procedural fairness, and the future of adjudication across common law, civil law, and religious legal systems.

Sezgin earned degrees from the University of Ankara, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SOAS–University of London, and the University of Washington. He has taught at the University of Washington, Harvard Divinity School, and the City University of New York, and has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the University of Oxford (IECL), Columbia University, Bielefeld University, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Delhi. He is currently pursuing the M.St. in AI Ethics and Society at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, where he is developing a comparative research program on AI, judicial decision-making, and the governance of courts.

Beyond academia, Sezgin has consulted for international organizations, including UNDP, UN Women, WHO, and USAID, on legal reform, gender justice, and human rights. He serves on the Executive Board of the Commission on Legal Pluralism and as Associate Editor of the  Journal of Legal Pluralism. His scholarship and commentary have appeared in outlets including  The Washington Post and  Al Jazeera English.