Joanna Harrington is a Professor of Law and the holder of the Eldon Foote Chair in International Business and Law at the University of Alberta. She is also a part-time Commissioner with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and a member of the Government of Alberta's Victims of Crime and Public Safety Programs Committee. Her teaching and research activities focus on matters at the intersection of national and international law, including the making of international treaties, the role of international institutions, international human rights law, and issues of international and transnational criminal law, including serious economic crimes. She has also served as an associate dean with university-wide responsibilities concerning graduate studies.
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The author of over 85 publications, her work can be found in leading law journals and highly-regarded edited collections, including the American Journal of International Law, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, Dalhousie Law Journal, the International & Comparative Law Quarterly, McGill Law Journal, Queen's Law Journal, and the Supreme Court Law Review, as well as The Oxford Handbook of the Canadian Constitution and the Routledge Handbook of Transnational Criminal Law. She is also the author, co-author or co-editor of six books, including International Law: Doctrine, Practice, and Theory, 2nd ed (Irwin Law, 2014), and has delivered over 90 presentations at international conferences, continuing legal education workshops, and community events. Her expertise has been cited in The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and Maclean's.
Her teaching and research activities also benefit from her experiences in legal practice, including a two-year secondment through Interchange Canada to serve as the academic-in-residence with the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now Global Affairs Canada). Working as a lawyer-diplomat, she has represented Canada at the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and she has served twice in New York as a member of Canada's official delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. She has also served as a consultant to international and national organizations, testified as an expert witness in court and before parliamentary committees, and assisted counsel in private practice on matters of diplomatic law, extradition, human rights, national security, and foreign corruption. Before becoming an academic, she worked for the late Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC of Britain's House of Lords on the passage of the Human Rights Act and the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, the creation of a Scottish Parliament, and the implementation of the Belfast (Good Friday) Peace Agreement concerning Northern Ireland. She was called to the bar in British Columbia in 1995 and Ontario in 2002.
Honours include the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize (2007), a Killam Annual Professorship (2012), a Fulbright Scholar Award (2016), the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) Prize for Academic Excellence (2018), the Honourable Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award (2019), and the inaugural Canadian Council on International Law (CCIL) Scholarly Paper Award (2019). Recognition of her work has also 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 holder of the Canada-US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Policy - and she has taught law as an invited professor in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Puerto Rico and Suriname. Her research activities have received external funding from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) since 2005.
Educated in Canada and abroad, she holds a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, a J.D. from the University of Victoria, and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Cambridge, where she held a W.M. Tapp studentship at Gonville and Caius College, a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship, and a Pegasus Trust scholarship from the Inns of Court. Her graduate program also included studies in Finland and Italy, earning the Academy of European Law's diploma in human rights law from the European University Institute in Italy.
Her teaching and research activities also benefit from her experiences in legal practice, including a two-year secondment through Interchange Canada to serve as the academic-in-residence with the Legal Affairs Bureau of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now Global Affairs Canada). Working as a lawyer-diplomat, she has represented Canada at the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and she has served twice in New York as a member of Canada's official delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. She has also served as a consultant to international and national organizations, testified as an expert witness in court and before parliamentary committees, and assisted counsel in private practice on matters of diplomatic law, extradition, human rights, national security, and foreign corruption. Before becoming an academic, she worked for the late Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC of Britain's House of Lords on the passage of the Human Rights Act and the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, the creation of a Scottish Parliament, and the implementation of the Belfast (Good Friday) Peace Agreement concerning Northern Ireland. She was called to the bar in British Columbia in 1995 and Ontario in 2002.
Honours include the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize (2007), a Killam Annual Professorship (2012), a Fulbright Scholar Award (2016), the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) Prize for Academic Excellence (2018), the Honourable Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award (2019), and the inaugural Canadian Council on International Law (CCIL) Scholarly Paper Award (2019). Recognition of her work has also 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 holder of the Canada-US Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Policy - and she has taught law as an invited professor in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Puerto Rico and Suriname. Her research activities have received external funding from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) since 2005.
Educated in Canada and abroad, she holds a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, a J.D. from the University of Victoria, and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Cambridge, where she held a W.M. Tapp studentship at Gonville and Caius College, a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Fellowship, and a Pegasus Trust scholarship from the Inns of Court. Her graduate program also included studies in Finland and Italy, earning the Academy of European Law's diploma in human rights law from the European University Institute in Italy.