Expertise: Law and Religion

Akande, Rabiat

Professor Rabiat Akande works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society. Her research explores law’s interplay with global inequality. She investigates this relationship in the historical setting of Europe’s nineteenth and twentieth-century empire, especially in its encounter with Africa and the Muslim World. Her work further grapples with the afterlife of that encounter for law, unveiling legacies that resound far beyond erstwhile colonies.

In her recent book, Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Akande investigates the case of the British imperial encounter in Colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, the book chronicles contestations between British colonial officials, Christian missionaries, and indigenous Muslim elites over law’s governance religious difference, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of those struggles. The book illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues–the relationship between religion, the state, and society–while also spotlighting law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change.

Beyond Entangled Domains, Dr. Akande’s work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law (forthcoming), the Law and History Review, the Journal of Law and Religion, the Supreme Court Law Review, Die Welt des Islam (forthcoming), and in co-edited volumes published by or forthcoming with the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, University of Toronto Press, and the University of Virginia Press. Dr. Akande is currently at work on “Malcolm X, Black Globalism, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism,” a book project that investigates the globalist critique of imperialism that was central to Malcolm X’s thought in his last years and inspired by his visits to Africa and the Muslim World. She is also at work on a volume interrogating histories of the idea of the “international” in pre-colonial Africa.

Dr. Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha with the support of the African Union and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among other institutions. Before Osgoode Hall Law School, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies as an Academy Scholar from 2019-2021. She received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation, “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. At Harvard University, Dr. Akande held the Clark Byse fellowship at the Law School and was a Dissertation Fellow and Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also served on the editorial board of the Harvard International Law Journal. Dr Akande taught courses at Harvard in the Law School and the Department for African and African American Studies. She also taught at Northeastern University School of Law. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Akande obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with First Class Honors and at the top of her class. She later studied at the Nigerian Law School, from which she also graduated with First Class Honors.

Dr. Akande’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including from the US National Science Foundation (as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Cravath International Research fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others. She serves on the International Journal of Law in Context editorial board. She is the co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s Africa Interest Group. She is also active in the American Society for Legal History, the Law and Society Association, and the African Studies Association.

Research Interests:  legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law and the global south, and (post)colonial African law and society.

Berger, Benjamin L.

Professor Benjamin L. Berger is Professor and York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Professor Berger served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018. He holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. Prior to joining Osgoode, he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, and was cross-appointed in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Victoria, where he began teaching in 2004. He holds a JSD and LLM from Yale University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar and a SSHRC doctoral fellow. He earned his LLB and the Law Society Gold Medal from the University of Victoria, and was awarded the Gold Medal in Arts and the Governor General’s Academic Medal for his BA (Hons) studies at the University of Alberta. In 2002-2003, Professor Berger served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada.

His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence.  He has published broadly in these fields and his work has appeared in leading legal and interdisciplinary journals and edited collections.  He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and served as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society from 2014-2018. He is also co-editor of multiple edited collections, including Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority (Hart, 2016) and The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). He has been a principal investigator or collaborator on multiple research grants and has received awards for his scholarly work, including the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination” and, in 2015, the CALT-ACPD Prize for Academic Excellence.

Professor Berger is active in judicial, professional, and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. While at UVic Law, Professor Berger twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award. He received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.

Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought and is the Academic Program Director of the Osgoode Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure.

Research Interests: Law and Religion; Criminal and Constitutional Law and Theory; the Law of Evidence; Legal History; Judgment and the Judiciary; Law and the Humanities.