Maria Vittoria Onufrio

Research Scholar since 2012
vittoria.onufrio@gmail.com

Onufrio received her Ph.D. in Comparative Law from University of Palermo in 2008 and her LLM from Suffolk University Law School. She has served as visiting scholar at Boston University Law School and visiting researcher at Suffolk University Law School and Loyola University Law School. She has been non-resident fellow at the Institute of European and Comparative Private Law at the University of Girona since 2006.

Her most recent articles and book chapters includes: Reconceptualizing Consumer Terms of Use for a Globalized Knowledge Economy,  14 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, 1085, 2012 (with Michael Rustad); Transnational Cultural and Licensing Issues, in Michael Rustad, Software Licenses: Principles & Practical Strategies, Oxford University Press, 691-751, 2010 (with Michael Rustad); The Exportability of the Principles of Software: Lost in Translation?, 2 Hastings Science and Technology Law Journal 25-80, 2010 (with Michael Rustad); The Constitutionalization of Contract Law in the Irish, the German and the Italian Legal Systems: Is Horizontal Indirect Effect like Direct Effect? A Short Comment on Professor Kumm’s View, 4 InDret: Review on the analysis of Law, 1-13, 2007; Legal Translation and Harmonization of European Contract Law: A Role for Comparative Lawyers, 2 InDret: Review on the analysis of Law, 1-14, 2007.

Her research project focuses on the phenomenon of Intersectional discrimination between gender, race, and disability in the European legal countries. Intersectional discrimination is referred to where somebody is discriminated against on several grounds at the same time and in such a way that these are mutually constitutive and inseparable. This form of discrimination has been relatively un-studied so far and even the European Legislature seems to neglect this phenomenon and to follow a single-axis approach banning only single grounded discrimination. This approach was criticized because it compels victims of discrimination to choose the ground upon which they rely in pursuing any claim of discrimination. Maria’s research project will analyze the EU anti-discrimination Directives and the case law of the European Countries to see if and to what extent the courts of some European Countries acknowledge and address the phenomenon of intersectional discrimination. She will investigate if there is a common core of legal solutions applied to address the cases of intersectional discrimination, or better at which level common solutions are applied and divergent solutions are kept. Then she will select the legal solutions in terms of better practices and will use them as the basis to create an original proposal for a new EU Directive addressing specifically the phenomenon of intersectional discrimination.