Dr. Livnat received his J.S.D. (Doctorate of the Science of Law) from Columbia Law School, where he was also a Fellow of the Columbia Public Policy Consortium.
During 2003-2012 he represented low-income Israeli and Palestinian workers, migrant workers and asylum seekers, first as the legal advisor of Kav LaOved, and later as part of the TAU Refugee Rights Clinic. He took part in impact litigation before the Supreme Court of Israel (e.g., HCJ 11437/05 on a female migrant worker's right to give birth and stay in Israel with her newborn until the full term of her guest worker visa, and HCJ 1105/06 on social rights of long stay migrant workers) and was involved in the Anti-Trafficking legislation proceedings of 2006. During 2014-2017 he served as the Editor-in-Chief of TAU's Journal of Law & Social Change.
Dr. Livnat combines academic work with activism for social change through non-profit organizations. Between 2012 and 2018 he served as the executive director of the Israel AIDS Task Force and since 2020 he serves as the executive director of Adva Center. He was a member of several public committees, side by side with being a research fellow in several academic institutions (e.g. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Trafflab – Labor Perspective to Human Trafficking, Tel Aviv University).
Dr. Livnat teaches and researched immigration law and policy at the Faculty of Law and at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Tel Aviv University. He is the academic supervisor of the Refugee Rights Clinic.
Recent publications:
Yuval Livnat and Hila Shamir, Gaining Control? Bilateral Labor Agreements and the Shared Interest of Sending and Receiving Countries to Control Migrant Workers and the Illicit Migration Industry, 23(2) Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 65 (2022).
