Rachela Er’el is a Lecturer in Law at UCLA School of Law and a fellow of the Israel Institute at UCLA. Her academic interests span international, constitutional, and criminal law, with a particular focus on international human rights law and the rights of prisoners and other persons deprived of liberty. Her work is interdisciplinary, drawing on legal analysis as well as history, sociology, criminology, political science, and philosophy. At UCLA Law, she teaches Incarceration and Human Rights in Comparative and International Law.

Er’el holds a Ph.D. in Law from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also completed postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Law. Her doctoral dissertation developed a multidisciplinary doctrinal framework for prisoners’ law and rights in international and Israeli law and received the Malcolm and Judith Shaw Prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in public international law and human rights. She earned her LL.M. in International and Public Law, magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; her thesis examined prisoners’ rights under international and European law and received an Academic Excellence Grant from the Justice Mishael Cheshin Center for Advanced Legal Studies. She received her LL.B. from Bar-Ilan University, with a minor in Torah and Jewish Thought.

Er’el began her legal career with internships in the High Court of Justice Department of the Israeli State Attorney’s Office and with a District Court judge, gaining experience in administrative, constitutional, and criminal law. She subsequently worked in the legal department of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, focusing primarily on litigation before the High Court of Justice. She later founded and directed a legal clinic for prisoners’ rights, where her work combined litigation with legislative advocacy, policy development, and the advancement of professional and academic discourse on prisoners’ rights. She went on to serve as external legal counsel to the Knesset’s Interior and Environment Committee on matters concerning prisoners and detainees, and later as a Public Complaints Investigator at the Office of the State Comptroller and Ombudsman of Israel. In parallel, for more than a decade, she served by appointment of Israel’s Minister of Public Security as an Official Visitor to prisons and detention facilities.

Selected Publications

• Leslie Sebba & Rachela Er’el, “Imprisonment and Human Rights in Israel: Uncertainty and Volatility,” Law & Social Inquiry, 50(4), 1053–1071 (2025). 
  
• Orna Alyagon Darr & Rachela Er’el, “The Conflicting Uses of Prison Visitation in Mandate Palestine,” Law & Social Inquiry, 47(3), 920–945 (2022). 
  
• Leslie Sebba & Rachela Er’el, “Beccaria on the Human Rights Committee? An Excursus on the Parameters of Human Rights and Penology,” in Antje du Bois-Pedain & Shachar Eldar (eds.), Re-Reading Beccaria: On the Contemporary Significance of a Penal Classic, 253–278 (Hart Publishing, 2022).