Expertise: Transnational Law

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

Research website on International Investment Arbitration and Public Policy

Blog

 

Rehaag, Sean

Professor Sean Rehaag is the Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies and the Director of the Refugee Law Laboratory. He specializes in immigration and refugee law, administrative law, legal process, access to justice, and new legal technologies. He frequently contributes to public debates about immigration and refugee law, and he engages in law reform efforts in these areas. He is also committed to exploring innovative teaching methodologies, with a particular interest in clinical and experiential education. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services.

Professor Rehaag’s interdisciplinary academic research focuses on empirical studies of immigration and refugee law decision-making processes. He currently holds an SSHRC grant involving new legal technologies, artificial intelligence and quantitative research on Canadian refugee adjudication. He is also pursuing research using experiments to better understand how refugee adjudicators make credibility assessments. In 2013, he received the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “Judicial Review of Refugee Determinations: The Luck of the Draw?”. He publishes yearly statistics on Canada’s refugee determination system. Many of his publications are available open-access on SSRN.

Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty in 2008, Professor Rehaag was a visiting scholar at the Université de Montreal’s Chaire de recherche du Canada en droit international des migrations. He has also been a visiting scholar with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings, a visiting researcher at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and an instructor at the University of Victoria and the Université de Sherbrooke. He holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, bachelor’s degrees in civil law and common law from McGill University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia.

Research Interests: Immigration and Refugee Law, Empirical Legal Studies, Judicial/Administrative Decision-Making, New Legal Technologies, Legal Process, Access to Justice, Gender and Sexuality

Okafor, Obiora Chinedu

Professor Obiora Chinedu Okafor is the Inaugural York Research Chair in International and Transnational Legal Studies. He joined Osgoode Hall Law School after holding faculty positions at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus, Nigeria, and at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has served as an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program; a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at MIT; a Visiting Professor at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France; a Visiting Professor at the St. Augustine International University, Kampala, Uganda; and as the Gani Fawehinmi Distinguished Chair of Human Rights Law at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

Professor Okafor has published extensively in the fields of international human rights law and immigration/refugee law, as well as general public international law (especially with regard to third world approaches to international law). He is the author of Refugee Law after 9/11: Sanctuary and Security in Canada and the United States (Vancouver: The University of British Columbia Press, 2020); The African Human Rights System, Activist Forces, and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Legitimizing Human Rights NGOs: Lessons from Nigeria (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2006); and Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2000). He has co-edited three books: Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives (The Hague: Kluwer, 1999); Humanizing Our Global Order: Essays in Honour of Ivan Head (University of Toronto Press, 2003); and The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003). He has edited four special journal issues, and published over one hundred (100) journal articles, book chapters and other scholarly writings. He is a Co-Editor-in-Chief, and was founding General Editor, of the Transnational Human Rights Review, and sits on the editorial advisory board of a number of scholarly periodicals. He is currently leading a major SSHRC-funded partnership development, research and dissemination project covering six countries relating to Canadian/African human rights engagements, and another project on the dissemination of the African Human Rights Action Plan. These projects follow on the recent completion under his leadership of two related, collaborative research and dissemination projects on the African Union’s African Human Rights Action Plan/planning process, and on Canada’s human rights engagements with state and civil society actors in Nigeria.

Professor Okafor received the 2010 Award of Excellence from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers, and has been awarded the Gold Medal for Exceptional Research and Major Contributions to Jurisprudence of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (2013). He has also won Osgoode’s Teaching Excellence Award twice, in 2002 and 2007. His doctoral dissertation at the University of British Columbia received the Governor General’s Gold Medal (the university prize for overall best dissertation).

Professor Okafor has served, since August 2017, as the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity (one of the principal groups of human rights experts who advise and report to the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly) and a former Chairperson of the United Nations Human Rights Council Advisory Committee (a Geneva-based committee of experts elected by the Human Rights Council to serve as its think tank and principal subsidiary organ). In these two capacities, he has authored over ten UN Reports. He has also served as an expert panelist for the United Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee and United Nations Working Group on People of African Descent. And he has worked as a consultant or adviser for several international organizations, government agencies, parliaments, and law firms.

Professor Okafor is the founder and convenor of Osgoode’s Research Seminar Series on International Law in the Global South (ILIGS), and of the Annual York University Oputa Lectures on governance in Africa, which has been held at Osgoode since 2004. Between 2009 and 2011, Professor Okafor chaired the Curriculum Reform Working Group, whose work led to important reforms in Osgoode’s upper-year JD curriculum, including the introduction of the praxicum, and additional upper-year writing requirements. He also founded the international and transnational law intensive program at Osgoode, and engineered Osgoode’s participation in the prestigious International Court of Justice University Traineeship Program.

Research Interests: International Law, International Human Rights, Immigration/Refugee Law, Nigerian Legal Studies

Currently on leave.

Mgbeoji, Ikechi

Following five years of practice in civil litigation specializing in Commercial Litigation and Intellectual Property Law, Professor Mgbeoji enrolled in the graduate program of Dalhousie University where he graduated, summa cum laude, with an LLM in 1999. A recipient of the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for the highest academic standing at the graduate level in Dalhousie University, he undertook his doctoral research in Patent Law, graduating, summa cum laude, in 2001. Throughout his academic career, Professor Mgbeoji has won numerous academic awards, scholarships and fellowships including the Killam Scholarship and the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft Award.  His teaching and research interests are in Patent Law, Trademarks, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, International Law on the Use of Force, International Environmental Law, Biotechnology and Law, Comparative Intellectual Property Law, Indigenous Peoples, and Anthropology. Professor Mgbeoji is the author of two books – Collective Insecurity: The Liberian Crisis, Unilateralism, & Global Order and Patents and Indigenous Peoples – and he is the co-author of Environmental Law in Developing Countries: Selected Issues. Prior to joining Osgoode in July 2003, he taught at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law.

Drummond, Susan G.

Professor Susan Drummond joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1999, and specializes in the areas of legal anthropology, comparative law, civil law, family law, and wills and estates. She was the first student in Canada to graduate with both a civil and common law degree as well as a Master’s in Social Work. She has a doctorate in law from McGill University. Her BA in philosophy and her postgraduate Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies from the Université d’Aix-Marseille, specializing in legal theory and legal anthropology, make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar. Beyond her publications in scholarly journals, she has published three books, Incorporating the Familiar: An Investigation into Legal Sensibilities in Nunavik, based on fieldwork on the interactions between state and non-state criminal law sensibilities in Inuit communities in northern Quebec; Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities, based on field work on non-state family law in Andalucia, which won the Canadian Law and Society Association/Association canadienne droit et société 2006 Book Prize; and Unthinkable Thoughts; Academic Freedom and the One State Model for Israel and Palestine, based on fieldwork on the intersections between politically controversial ideas and the Canadian academy, was published in November, 2013.

Professor Drummond is currently engaged in an extensive, fine-grained ethnographic study of elder law, elder financial abuse, and estates and trust law and litigation in Ontario, with a focus on legal practice, legal ethics, and legal professionalism in the associated bar.

Research Interests: Family Law, Estates and Trusts, Legal Theory, Comparative Law, Legal Anthropology

Buchanan, Ruth

Ruth Buchanan joined Osgoode Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty, Professor Buchanan taught at the law schools of the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. Professor Buchanan also holds an ongoing appointment as a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she teaches in the Melbourne Law Masters program.

Professor Buchanan holds an SJD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an LLB from the University of Victoria and an AB from Princeton University. In 2011, Professor Buchanan founded the Law.Arts.Culture Colloquium, to create a vibrant forum for the discussion of emerging interdisciplinary work on law and humanities. Since that time, Professor Buchanan, through LAC, has hosted more than two dozen speakers, events and installations. She is also a past Director of the Graduate Program (Research), and a past co-Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies.

An interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work spans critical legal theory, sociology of law and cultural legal studies, Dr. Buchanan’s scholarship has engaged with a range of topics including NAFTA and labour rights, the WTO and global constitutionalism, social movements and resistance to globalization, Indigenous law and legal pluralism, law and film. She has published widely and collaborates frequently with legal scholars in Canada and internationally. Professor Buchanan co-edited the collections Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014) with Peer Zumbansen and Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (2012) with Sundhya Pahuja and Stewart Motha. She has published widely, including in the Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities; Miami Law Review; Leiden Journal of International Law; Law,Text,Culture; Journal of Legal Education, Nordic Journal of International Law; Osgoode Hall Law Journal, and the Journal of Law and Society. She has been involved in the editorial boards or editorial advisory boards of the Canadian Journal of Women and Law, Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities, Transnational Legal Theory.

In 2015-16, Professor Buchanan was awarded an Osgoode Hall Research Fellowship for her ongoing project, “Visualizing Developments,” which considers the variety of visual mechanisms through which knowledge about development is produced and disseminated by international institutions. Professor Buchanan is also currently writing a book on International Development with Sundhya Pahuja and Luis Eslava as part of the Routledge-Cavendish Critical Approaches to Law series.

Professor Buchanan has taught courses in the areas of: Globalization and Law, Law and Social Change, Trade, Human Rights and Development, Law and Film. In the Osgoode Graduate Program, she has taught the Legal Research seminar and convened the Study Group on Law in a Global Context. Professor Buchanan has supervised many LLM and doctoral students in the areas of law and development, legal theory, legal sociology, or visual legal studies and law and film.

Research Interests: Law and Development, Legal Theory, Law and Film

Bhabha, Faisal

Faisal Bhabha is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the Canadian Common Law LLM degree program. He has researched and published in the areas of constitutional law, multiculturalism, law and religion, disability rights, national security and access to justice. He teaches constitutional law, human rights, legal ethics, and appellate advocacy. Previously, he sat as Vice-chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (2008-2011). He maintains a varied public and private law practice, appearing before administrative boards and tribunals and at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He advises and represents a variety of individuals and public interest organizations in matters pertaining to constitutional law and human rights. He has appeared as an expert witness before Canadian parliamentary committees and served as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Ontario. He has lived and worked in the Middle East and South Africa, and has lectured and taught in many countries. He is currently a senior editor with the International Review of Human Rights Law.

Research Interests: constitutional law; equality and anti-discrimination; administrative law; legal ethics and professionalism; legal process; dispute resolution; legal education