Joanna Harrington, BA, JD, PhD

Area of Study / Keywords

international law foreign relations law international organizations United Nations international human rights law interim measures international legal cooperation extradition transnational criminal law corporate criminality corruption foreign bribery non-trial resolutions deferred prosecution agreements asset recovery

About

Professor Joanna Harrington serves as the Associate Dean Research for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Special Advisor to the Vice-President (Research and Innovation). She is also a Professor in the Faculty of Law and holds the Eldon Foote Chair in International Business and Law.

As a legal scholar, Professor Harrington’s work focuses on international law and its national application, the law of international organizations, international human rights law, international and transnational criminal law, and international legal cooperation, including extradition. Recent work has focussed on the foreign corruption of public officials, the corporate commission of transnational crimes, and the evolving use of non-trial resolutions, such as deferred prosecution agreements and victim-centred settlements.

Her research has been published widely in law journals and edited collections, including the American Journal of International Law, The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the McGill 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 a co-author of the widely used textbook, International Law: Doctrine, Practice, and Theory, now in its third edition.

The impact of her scholarship extends beyond academia to influence both policy making and legal practice. Her work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords, Canada’s House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Canada’s Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights, the Parliament of Australia’s Joint Standing Committee on Trade and Investment Growth, the OECD Working Group on Bribery, the International Law Association’s Committee on International Human Rights Law and Practice, and the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. It can also be found mentioned in Library of Parliament briefing papers in both Canada and the United Kingdom, while her media mentions include The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, CBC News, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Maclean’s.

Her record has led to visiting appointments at the University of New South Wales, the University of Oxford, and the University of Texas at Austin, the latter as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Policy Studies. She has also taught law in Australia, China, England, Japan, Puerto Rico and Suriname, and engaged in cross-sectoral work with the Canadian Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). From 2010 to 2015, she was an associate dean with the now-named Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and from 2016 to 2023, she was a member of the SSHRC-funded Canadian Partnership for International Justice, which was awarded a 2022 SSHRC Impact Award and a 2023 Governor General’s Innovation Award.

Beyond the academy, Professor Harrington has made significant contributions to Canadian and international legal practice. She served for three years as a part-time member of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and spent two years seconded to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (now Global Affairs Canada), where she advised the government on matters of international criminal law, international human rights law, and corporate social responsibility. She has represented Canada as a lawyer-diplomat in multilateral negotiations 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 has testified as an expert witness in court and before parliamentary committees. Her consultancy work has included capacity-building projects with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and independent investigations of workplace complaints of harassment and misconduct. She is a long-serving member of the board of directors of the Canadian Council on International Law and has assisted counsel in private practice on matters of diplomatic immunity, human rights, foreign bribery, and extradition. Before transitioning to academia, she worked as the parliamentary legal officer to a member of Britain's House of Lords during a critical period of constitutional reform.

Professor Harrington holds a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science from the University of British Columbia, a Juris Doctor from the University of Victoria, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Law from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Tapp scholar at Gonville and Caius College and a Pegasus Scholar with the Inns of Court. She also holds a diploma in human rights law from the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute in Italy. She articled with one of Canada's largest law firms and qualified as a lawyer in British Columbia in 1995, and then Ontario in 2002.

Her career has been recognized with numerous honours, including the Canadian Bar Association-Alberta Branch & Law Society of Alberta Distinguished Service Award in Legal Scholarship (2022), the inaugural Canadian Council on International Law Scholarly Paper Award (2019), the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Prize for Academic Excellence (2018), and a Fulbright Scholar Award (2016). She has received several research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and within the University of Alberta, she is a past recipient of the Honourable Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award (2019), a Killam Annual Professorship (2012), and the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize (2007).

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