Yuri Behari-Leak
Teaching Assistant in Administrative Law, Criminal Law and Evidence
Room 6.39 - Kramer Law Building
BSocSci (distinction) Psych Hons (first class) LLB (magna cum laude)
Yuri Behari-Leak is a teaching assistant in the Department of Public Law. He holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences specialising in Psychology, Law and Film & Television Studies, an Honours degree in Psychology, and an LLB, all from the University of Cape Town. He has previously worked as a tutor in the Department of Psychology and as a forensic psychology assistant in private practice.
Yuri’s research interests in law include administrative law, constitutional law and theory, access to justice, international and comparative human rights law, and social and criminal justice. His broader interdisciplinary research interests include decolonial feminism, decoloniality, gender-based violence, artistic qualitative methodologies, critical psychology, film analysis, horror cinema, and feminist film theory. He is a member of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa at UCT and has presented research twice at the annual Psychological Society of South Africa conferences as part of the Hub’s Unsettling Knowledge Production on Gendered and Sexual Violence in South Africa Project.
He is currently an editorial assistant to South African Constitutional Law (Brickhill et al, eds) and has worked as a research assistant for the Centre for Law and Society, where he assisted with proofreading Edwin Cameron: Influences and Impact (2025) (Ally & Boonzaier, eds). He has also guest lectured in the Administrative Law and Criminal Law courses. He is passionate about mooting and has represented UCT in competitions such as the Kate O’Regan Intervarsity Moot and the Jessup International Law Moot.
Beyond academia, Yuri is also an actor, writer and director active in film and theatre spaces in Cape Town, having recently directed a feminist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a short documentary inspired by his Honours thesis, Lean In, which explores the experiences of postgraduate researchers doing work on gender-based violence in South Africa.