Expertise: International Law

Ahmad, Hassan M.

Professor Hassan M. Ahmad is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School where he researches and teaches on topics related to corporate governance, business and human rights, transnational law, tort law, international law and climate change litigation. Prior to joining Osgoode Hall, Professor Ahmad was an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He also served as a full-time Replacement Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law (Common Law Section). He holds an SJD from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, an LLM from the University of California, Berkeley, and a JD from Osgoode Hall. During his doctorate, he was a visiting scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. Prior to entering academia, Professor Ahmad worked at the International Criminal Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and as a private practice civil and class actions litigator in Toronto.

Professor Ahmad’s research has been recognized by a number of prestigious scholarly organizations, including the American Society of International Law and the American Society of Comparative Law. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Litigating Business and Human Rights Violations: Themes, Perspectives, and Prospects (Cambridge, University Press, forthcoming). His work has also appeared in leading Canadian and foreign journals such as the American Journal of International Law, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Berkeley Journal of International Law, UBC Law Review, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Queen’s Law Journal, and Transnational Legal Theory, among several others. He has also published several book chapters in edited volumes. His research has been funded by, among others, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Law Foundation of British Columbia, the Hampton Fund at UBC, and the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research.

At the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Professor Ahmad won teaching awards for in-person and online teaching as well as for his mentorship of JD and graduate students. Outside of his academic work, he has continued to be involved in public interest litigation, representing clients at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Otherwise, Professor Ahmad lends his expertise regularly to media outlets. His commentary on high profile civil cases, issues of corporate accountability, and climate change has appeared in, for instance, The Globe and Mail, CBC News, CTV News, The Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, and the Winnipeg Free Press, among others.

Research Interests:  Torts, Corporate Governance, Business and Human Rights, Climate Change Litigation, Administrative Law, Civil Procedure, International Law, Transnational Law, Class Actions, Colonial Legal History, Islamic Law

Bandopadhyay, Saptarishi

I am an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. I am also a research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University, and a Senior Fellow at Melbourne University Law School.

My first book, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. In All Is Well, I offer a history of the mutually constitutive relationship between disasters and states during the eighteenth-century and show the enduring influence of the underlying narratives, instincts, techniques, and practices on global disaster management today.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first examines the history of war, environmental degradation/disasters, and human displacement from 1860 to the present. This research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council Insight Development Grant and supported by Osgoode Hall Law School, York University’s Center for Refugee Studies, and the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. The second book project presents a legal and environmental history of the relationship between the international environmentalism movement of the 1960s and 70s, and contemporary global crises of food insecurity and climate change.

I have published in encyclopedias, edited volumes and in legal and interdisciplinary journals such as the University of British Columbia Law Review, the Fordham Environmental Law Review, Global Jurist, the Indian Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights. I occasionally write essays and book reviews for public facing periodicals and websites and have developed several case studies for Harvard Law School’s Case Studies Program.

During 2016-2017, I was a Visiting Professor and Catalyst Fellow at Osgoode, and an adjunct faculty at Northeastern University School of Law. I hold an SJD, an interdisciplinary doctorate from Harvard Law School, LLMs from Harvard Law School and American University’s Washington College of Law, and a BA LLB (with honors) from the National University of Juridical Sciences, India.

At Harvard, I received the Irving Oberman Memorial Environmental Law Prize and the Abram Chayes International Public Service Fellowship. I have also received research and advocacy fellowships from the Canadian Social Sciences and Research Council, the American Society for Legal History, the American Society for Environmental History, the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, the Public International Law and Policy Group, the Center for International Environmental Law, Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

I have studied and worked in disaster management in central India, in the borderlands between India, Pakistan, and China, and in the Philippines. I have also trained and advised officials and civil society in India, Thailand, Canada, and at the United Nations. From 2006 to 2010, I was an associate with Radon & Ishizumi in New York and worked on pharmaceutical and biotechnology projects. During this time, I also advised public authorities and corporate clients on constitution development in Nepal and environmental policymaking in the Caucasus, respectively.

Twitter: @saptarishi_b

Research Interests: Law, history, and politics of Disasters, International law, State formation, Environmental law and politics, Environmental conflict, Humanitarianism, Human displacement, Risk, Copyright.

Matthews, Heidi

Professor Heidi Matthews researches and teaches in the areas of international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory. Her work theorizes contemporary shifts in the practice and discourse of the global legal regulation of political violence, with particular attention to history and gender, as well as political, critical and aesthetic theory.

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Matthews held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the SOAS School of Law, University of London. She served as a law clerk to the judges of the Appeals Chamber at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and as an intern at the Immediate Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Her doctoral dissertation, “From Aggression to Atrocity: Interrogating the Jus in Bello Turn in International Criminal Law” was awarded Harvard Law School’s Laylin Prize. Professor Matthews has been a Fellow of the Institute for Global Law and Policy and a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School, as well as a Fellow at the Film Study Center, the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Professor Matthews’ current projects include a critical legal evaluation of American, Canadian and British counterinsurgency policy and practice, a reevaluation of the role of international criminal law during the Cold War, and an intellectual and political history of the concept of military necessity in international law. She is also working on a research and documentary film project that examines narratives of Allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women at the end of World War II. Professor Matthews is active in several international research networks, including the Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law and Cold War International Law projects.

Research Interests: International Criminal Law; Law of War/International Humanitarian Law; Public International Law; International Human Rights Law; Feminist, Legal and Political Theory; Law and the Arts.

Boittin, Margaret

Professor Boittin is the author of The Regulation of Prostitution in China: Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Based on ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys, the book examines how the regulation of prostitution shapes both the lives of female sex workers and the frontline police officers and public health officials who are responsible for implementing the laws and policies that govern sex work in China. Boittin also conducts research on the regulation of human trafficking and forced labor. She has carried out randomized controlled trials examining rights awareness campaigns on labor abuse of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, and on attitudes and behaviors pertaining to human trafficking vulnerability of both the general population and police officers in Nepal.  Her research has been supported by the US Department of Labor, USAID, Humanity United, and the National Science Foundation.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, and her JD from Stanford. Her articles have been published in Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, and American Political Science Review.

Walker, Janet

Janet Walker is a full professor and past Associate Dean. She currently teaches private international law, international commercial arbitration and complex litigation in the JD and the professional LLM programs and is Director of the Professional LLM in Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution. She has also taught Civil Procedure, Professional Responsibility and International Business Transactions and has served as Convener of the Litigation, Dispute Resolution and the Administration of Justice Stream, and Director of the Mooting Program.

Professor Walker is the author of Castel and Walker: Canadian Conflict of Laws, and the Halsbury’s Laws of Canada volume on the Conflict of Laws; she is the General Editor of The Civil Litigation Process, and of Class Actions in Canada, and co-editor of Common Law, Civil Law and the Future of Categories. She is also a co-author of Irwin Essentials: Civil Procedure, Private International Law in Common Law Canada, and A Practical Guide to Mooting.

Professor Walker has lectured in Wuhan and Xi’an, and she has taught Conflict of Laws as a visitor at Monash, University of Haifa and University of Toronto, as a Hauser Global Visiting Professor at NYU in New York and in its joint program with NUS in Singapore, and at Monash University’s Prato Campus. She taught comparative procedure as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford, and advocacy at University of Zagreb’s Zadar Program, and for the past thirteen years, she has taught private international law as a Foreign Research Professor at Tunis II, where she has also led the International Lawyers for Africa Tunisian National Committee. Professor Walker has led the Osgoode summer program at Hebrew University of Jerusalem on five occasions, and served as faculty advisor to the Osgoode Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot for the past thirteen years and the Tunis team for four years.

Professor Walker has lectured at The Hague Academy of International Law Summer Program and co-chaired the 72nd Biennial Conference of the International Law Association and the International Association of Procedural Law’s Toronto Conference; and she led the Project on Teaching Procedure, which produced the OHLJ Special Issue on Teaching Procedure.

Professor Walker has served as an International Advisor to the American Law Institute in its project with Unidroit to develop Principles and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure; and as a member of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada Committee on National Class Actions, of the IBA Task Force on Guidelines on Recognition and Enforcement of Collective Redress Judgments, of the ILA Committee on International Civil Litigation, the ABA Canada/US Class Working Group on Protocols for Parallel Class Actions and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada’s Project on Uniform International Arbitration Legislation. She has served as President of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association, Chair of the Toronto Chapter of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and she is Secretary General of the International Association of Procedural Law. Professor Walker was the Law Commission of Ontario’s first Scholar in Residence, she has been the Common Law Advisor to the Federal Courts Rules Committee since 2006, and she is currently serving as Academic Advisor to the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Professor Walker is a member of the American Law Institute and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. She is a member of the University Club of Toronto, the Athenaeum Club in London.

Professor Walker has served as an ICC and ICDR arbitrator in various matters and she consults and serves as expert in matters of international litigation and arbitration and complex litigation. She is a member of the panel of foreign arbitrators of the ICDR, CIETAC, SHIAC, KLRCA and a member arbitrator of Arbitration Place, Toronto, and Outer Temple Chambers, London.

Research Interests: International Litigation and Arbitration, Comparative Procedure, Advocacy.

Wai, Robert S.

Robert Wai has been a member of the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1998, where he researches and teaches in various areas of international economic law including International Trade Regulation and International Business Transactions. His teaching has also included Contracts, Ethical Lawyering in a Global Community, and Law and Economic Relations.  He has served in a number of governance roles including as Associate Dean, as a member of the Osgoode Hall Faculty Association executive and the Board of Trustees of the York University Pension Plan, and as chair of Faculty Council and a number of its standing committees.

Professor Wai has been a Jean Monnet Fellow and Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, and a visiting professor at other international institutions including the University of Hong Kong, Sciences Po Law School in Paris, and Brown University. Since 2010 Professor Wai has served on the Academic Council of the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) and as a regular core faculty at its workshops. Professor Wai graduated with a BCom in economics from McGill University (Beatty Gold Medalist), and an MPhil degree in international relations at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After completing an LLB from the University of British Columbia, he clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Gérard La Forest, and worked at law firms in Vancouver and New York.  He completed his doctorate at Harvard Law School, where his dissertation critically examined structures of policy argumentation in private international law.

Professor Wai’s research explores how the contemporary global economy is constituted and regulated by plural regimes of transnational law including public and private law, domestic and international law, substantive and procedural law, and state and non-state norms. In 2019, he was the Donald Mawhinney Lecturer in Professional Ethics at UBC, and in the summer of 2021 he will deliver a course on Liberalism and Private International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law.

Van Harten, Gus

Gus Van Harten joined the faculty in January 2008 and teaches Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, International Investment Law, and Governance of the International Financial System. Previously he was a faculty member in the Law Department of the London School of Economics. He has received the William Robson Memorial Prize from LSE, a Scholar in Residence fellowship from the Law Commission of Ontario, a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, an Overseas Research Award from Universities UK, and a Research Award from the Canadian International Development Agency.

Van Harten’s most recent book is The Trouble with Foreign Investor Protection (OUP, 2020). His previous books include Investment Treaty Arbitration and Public Law (OUP, 2007); Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints (OUP, 2013); and Sold Down the Yangtze: Canada’s Lopsided Investment Deal with China (Lorimer, 2015). He also co-edits a leading Canadian text: Administrative Law — Cases and Materials (Emond Montgomery, 2010, 2015, and 2021). His academic articles have been published in the Canadian Yearbook of International Law, European Journal of International Law, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, International Journal of Evidence and Proof, Journal of International Dispute Settlement, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Queen’s Law Journal, Review of International Political Economy, Supreme Court Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, Yearbook of International Investment Law and Policy, and other journals. Most of his academic articles are freely available here.

Van Harten participates in policy debates with a view to providing accessible information on issues of public importance, especially on trade agreements and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). He has made submissions to parliamentary committees in Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany and has advised various governments and non-governmental organizations. He has also appeared in media in Canada, such as L’actualité, CBC, CTV, Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, Radio Canada International, The Toronto Star, and TV Ontario; and in international media such as American Lawyer, ARD (Germany), Ariran Korea TV, Austrian Public TV, Bloomberg, CCTV News (China), Channel 2 (Netherlands), Der Spiegel, L’Echo, The Guardian, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio (USA), Reuters, and Telesur.

Before becoming an academic, Van Harten worked for two judicial inquiries in Canada – the Arar Inquiry of 2004-06 and the Walkerton Inquiry of 2000-02 – and as a law clerk at the Ontario Court of Appeal. He is also proud of his past work as a teaching assistant, lifeguard and swimming instructor, dishwasher, temporary labourer, and grocery clerk.

Research Interests: Administrative Law; International Investment Law and Arbitration; International Monetary Law and Policy; Inquiries and Investigations

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Tanguay-Renaud, François

Professor François Tanguay-Renaud has been a professor at Osgoode since 2008. He is currently the Program Director of the Osgoode Certificate in the Laws of Emergency, and of the Professional LLM in Canadian Common Law. From 2012 until 2021, he was Director of York’s Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. He is also one of the founders and first Director of York’s Juris Doctor/Master of Arts (JD/MA) combined program in law and philosophy, and a former Associate Dean Research, Graduate Studies, and Institutional Relations.

Professor Tanguay-Renaud holds degrees in both civil and common law from McGill University, where he was both a Loran Scholar and a Greville-Smith Scholar. He also studied at the National University of Singapore, and completed his graduate work (BCL, MPhil, DPhil) at the University of Oxford, where he was in turn a Rhodes Scholar, holder of the Studentship of the Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of Law, as well as doctoral fellow of the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) and of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Tanguay-Renaud was a Lecturer in Law at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Marie Deschamps of the Supreme Court of Canada, and worked with the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development and the Asian Network for Free Elections in Thailand, as well as with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Since starting at Osgoode, he has held Visiting Professor appointments at the University of Minnesota Law School (Robina Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice), the University of Oxford (H.L.A. Hart Fellow), the National University of Singapore, the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics and Faculty of Law, Massey College, and the National Law School of India University (NLSIU). He currently also holds an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of McMaster University.

His current academic interests span a wide range of subject areas — but notably, criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional and public law, emergency law, AI and the law, and public international law — viewed mostly through the lens of analytical legal theory. He is editor of Rethinking Criminal Law Theory: New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational, and International Criminal Law (with James Stribopoulos, Hart Publishing, 2012), From Morality to Law and Back Again: Liber Amicorum for John Gardner (with Michelle Madden Dempsey, Oxford University Press, 2023), and has published articles in leading journals such as Ethics, Legal Theory, Res Publica, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, the UBC Law Review, the Asian Yearbook of International Law, as well as in many leading edited collections.  He currently holds an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a research project on “Reconceiving Procedural Fairness” in light of the advent of Artificial Intelligence (with Vincent Chiao).

Professor Tanguay-Renaud regularly teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, emergency law, the philosophical foundations of criminal law, jurisprudence, and the rule of law. He was the recipient of the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2017, and of the Osgoode Hall Law School Faculty Service Award in 2020.

Research Interests: Theory of criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional and public law, international law, and associated areas of political and moral philosophy; the regulation of state surveillance; artificial intelligence and the law (with a focus on criminal law); emergencies and the law; jurisprudence; the rule of law; collective, corporate, and state responsibility; war ethics; Canadian, American and South Asian constitutional law and politics.

Scott, Craig M.

Professor Scott’s teaching and research have been primarily in the fields of public international law and private international law, with a focus on the place of international human rights law in both of these fields. His most recent work draws on all three of these fields, including in the areas of human rights torts across borders, transnational corporate accountability and transitional justice.  He has also written on constitutional rights protection in Canada and abroad. Much of his work has been on the theory and doctrine of economic, social and cultural rights. His work and teaching is strongly influenced by his interests in legal theory and in policy responses to globalization. He is series editor of Hart Monographs in Transnational and International Law, and is Founding Editor of Transnational Legal Theory.

Professor Scott has sought to create productive linkages between his academic work and various external commitments, particularly engagement with civil society. On the Canadian scene, he was one of the drafters of the Alternative Social Charter put forward during the Charlottetown constitutional round. He has been closely involved in advising equality-seeking, notably anti-poverty, groups on Canadian Charter of Rights litigation and on preparing interventions before various UN human rights bodies on Canada’s record of treaty compliance. He has been involved in appeals or interventions in the Supreme Court of Canada in major cases which have dealt with the interface of international law and Canadian law (Pushpanathan, Reference re Secession of Quebec, Baker). He advised in the formulation of the statement of claim in the civil lawsuit of Maher Arar against the Government of Canada and provided an expert report on Arar’s travel security during the settlement process.

Professor Scott was closely involved in the development of key aspects of the current South African constitution, beginning with his role advising the African National Congress on these matters while the ANC was still in exile. In 1993-1994, he served as co-counsel for the government of Bosnia in a case before the International Court of Justice, with responsibility for developing arguments on the limits of the powers of the UN Security Council. He has given academic opinions on international law to various governments and international organizations on issues related to such matters as the law of the sea, territorial claims and adjudicative procedures; he has also given opinions to non-governmental organizations and aboriginal government representatives on matters ranging from the legality of economic sanctions on Iraq to inland fisheries jurisdiction to transfer of environmental technology to counter global climate change. More recently, he was heavily involved with the London-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice and with the civil-society truth commission in Honduras known as the Comisión de Verdad, on which he served as a Commissioner.

Professor  Scott was a member of the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, from 1989 to 2001. He joined Osgoode Hall Law School in 2000 following a term as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.  From 2001 to 2004, he was Osgoode’s inaugural Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies). During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was an Ikerbasque Fellow with the Basque Government’s Foundation for Science, based in Bilbao at the Universidad de Deusto. He was Director of the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security from 2006 until the end of 2011.  He served in 2020-21 as the Graduate Program Director for Osgoode’s PhD and research-stream LLM programs.

Prior to starting his academic career, Professor Scott served as law clerk to the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Brian Dickson. He attended the Universities of Oxford and London on a Rhodes Scholarship.

From March 2012 to October 2015, he served as Member of Parliament for Toronto-Danforth in Canada’s House of Commons, and was the New Democratic Party’s Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform.

Proud to be banned for life from Russia, as of August 31, 2022.

Research Interests: Transnational Law, Legal Theory, Law and Social Justice, Democratic Theory and Institutions, Law and the Arts, Constitutional Law

Saberi, Hengameh

Professor Hengameh Saberi’s main areas of interest are international law,international legal theory and history, jurisprudence, disability law and human rights, philosophy of pragmatism, and Islamic political and legal thought.  She has previously taught at Brown University, University of Tennessee College of Law, Boston University School of Law, and Harvard University. Prior to joining Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2012, she was a post-doctoral fellow jointly at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy and the Harvard Law School Project on Disability.