Omer Nir-Becker is a legal historian who studies how the legal instruments of the past shape the institutions we live under today. Trained in both law and history, he currently studies early modern royal charters as vehicles of British imperial expansion, which granted corporations and individual proprietors the authority to govern colonies overseas. 

This research pairs archival materials with computational methods, building a corpus of imperial charters (1555–1732) to study this transformation at scale. His thesis, “One Crown, Many Ventures,” supervised by Professor Ron Harris, asks how the monarchy used a single legal instrument, the royal charter, to create and govern ventures as varied as trading companies and proprietary colonies. The project, which uncovers empirical evidence that the imperial strategy was more coherent than previously recognized, was accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History.

Omer, a member of the Israel Bar Association, completed his thesis at Tel Aviv University, where he was supported by fellowships and grants from the Center for AI & Data and the Center for the Study of the United States. He holds an LL.B. and a B.A. in history, both magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As an undergraduate, he was a fellow in the Institute for History Honors Program, received the George L. Mosse Prize for his dissertation, and served as a teaching and research assistant in the Faculty of Law. As a Fulbright Fellow, Omer will pursue an LL.M. at Harvard Law School.