Joanna Harrington
Professor | Faculty of Law | University of Alberta
Joanna Harrington holds the Eldon Foote Chair in International Business and Law at the University of Alberta. She also serves as a part-time member of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. A law professor for over 20 years, her teaching and research activities focus on the interplay between obligations of national and international law. Her work has led to visiting appointments at the University of New South Wales in Australia, the University of Oxford, and the University of Texas at Austin, the latter as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Policy. In 2018, she was awarded the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Prize for Academic Excellence. She has also served as a consultant with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and as a lawyer-diplomat with Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now Global Affairs Canada), where she provided advice to government on matters of international law and represented Canada in the negotiation of new legal instruments at the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. She earned her PhD in law at the University of Cambridge as a Tapp scholar at Gonville and Caius College and a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellow.
Joanna Harrington is the author of over 85 publications, ranging from law review articles, book chapters and reference texts to scholarly blogposts and public policy commentaries. She has also delivered over 80 presentations at conferences, continuing legal education workshops and community outreach events.
Her work contributes to our understanding of foreign relations law, the law and practice of international organizations, the interplay between international human rights law and national bills of rights, and inter-state efforts to address the commission of serious cross-border crime. Her published work can be found in leading law journals, including the American Journal of International Law, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, Dalhousie Law Journal, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, McGill Law Journal, Queen's Law Journal and the Supreme Court Law Review, and she has contributed to several highly-regarded collections, including The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution and the Routledge Handbook of Transnational Criminal Law. She is also a co-author with John H. Currie, Craig Forcese and Valerie Oosterveld of International Law: Doctrine, Practice, and Theory, 2nd ed (Irwin Law, 2014).
Her research activities have attracted funding since 2005 from Canada’s national granting agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is currently a member of the SSHRC-funded Canadian Partnership for International Justice / Partenariat Canadien pour la Justice Internationale (CPIJ-PCJI), which aims to use legal research to secure greater accountability for the victims of serious international crimes before both national and international courts.
Her work contributes to our understanding of foreign relations law, the law and practice of international organizations, the interplay between international human rights law and national bills of rights, and inter-state efforts to address the commission of serious cross-border crime. Her published work can be found in leading law journals, including the American Journal of International Law, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, Dalhousie Law Journal, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, McGill Law Journal, Queen's Law Journal and the Supreme Court Law Review, and she has contributed to several highly-regarded collections, including The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution and the Routledge Handbook of Transnational Criminal Law. She is also a co-author with John H. Currie, Craig Forcese and Valerie Oosterveld of International Law: Doctrine, Practice, and Theory, 2nd ed (Irwin Law, 2014).
Her research activities have attracted funding since 2005 from Canada’s national granting agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is currently a member of the SSHRC-funded Canadian Partnership for International Justice / Partenariat Canadien pour la Justice Internationale (CPIJ-PCJI), which aims to use legal research to secure greater accountability for the victims of serious international crimes before both national and international courts.