Sovereign Debt Forum Research Assistant at Georgetown University in Law Center

Job description

Georgetown University comprises two unique campuses in the nation’s capital. With the Hilltop Campus located in the heart of the historic Georgetown neighborhood, and the Capitol Campus, just minutes from the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Supreme Court, Georgetown University offers rigorous academic programs, a global perspective, and unparalleled opportunities to engage with Washington, D.C. Our community is a close-knit group of remarkable individuals driven by intellectual inquiry, a commitment to social justice, and a shared dedication to making a difference in the world. Requirements Job Overview The Sovereign Debt Forum’s #PublicDebtIsPublic initiative (#PDIP) is dedicated to the principle that public debt must be robustly accountable to the public. This means that information on government borrowing and lending—including sovereign debt contracts, legal and institutional frameworks—and capacity development tools should all be readily available and free to the public. To advance this principle, the #PDIP initiative aims to shift debt transparency norms and practices to create a presumption in favor of public disclosure of both legal and financial terms of public debt in a format that is publicly accessible, intelligible, and comparable. The #PDIP project is the creation of the first centrally collated data repository where three types of sovereign debt data and documentation will be open-sourced: (i) full-text sovereign debt contracts, fully searchable and tagged on a term-by-term basis, (ii) domestic laws and regulations governing borrowing and authorization procedures and debt disclosure, and (iii) an interactive capacity-building platform, including web-based courses, short and long-form tutorials produced by Sovereign Debt Forum participants and affiliates as well as legal analysis and guidance materials to complement existing public debt management capacity-building programs from official, private, and civil-society sources. This data repository will provide governments in countries with limited resources, civil society in borrowing and lending countries, and official and private creditors a shared source of current and authoritative information on sovereign borrowing, lending and restructuring terms. The #PDIP platform was officially launched in Oct 2025, developed jointly by the Sovereign Debt Forum and Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute, and generously supported by a grant from the Gates Foundation. The Sovereign Debt Forum is a collaboration between the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS) at Queen Mary University of London, established in 2019 to advance interdisciplinary legal research in sovereign debt, to serve as a platform for convening public debt stakeholders from government, market, civil society, and academic institutions around the world, and to support capacity building in public debt management, especially in low- and middle-income countries, countries facing debt distress, and those new to international borrowing and lending. Sovereign Debt Forum affiliates include leading academics and practitioners in the field of sovereign debt. The Sovereign Debt Forum is looking for a research assistant to assist in gathering full-text sovereign debt contracts, tagging key clauses in these contracts, and gathering information about the domestic borrowing framework of different jurisdictions. Research assistants should have experience with contract analysis and familiarity with the legal system of a non-US jurisdiction. Work Interactions This position will report directly to the SDF Co-Director, Head of Research and SDF Fellow at the Law Center. The research assistants will work with a team of 2-5 other research assistants implementing the subsequent phases of PDIP in a remote capacity. Requirements and Qualifications Bachelor’s degree required; JD, LLM and/or other graduate training, law practice and/or management experience strongly preferre