Contact
Professor and Vice-Dean, Faculty of Law
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
international law foreign relations law international organizations international human rights law interim measures international legal cooperation extradition transnational criminal law corporate criminality economic crime foreign bribery non-trial resolutions deferred prosecution agreements asset recovery
About
Joanna Harrington is a Professor and the Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Law. She holds the Eldon Foote Chair in International Business and Law.
A law professor for 25 years, her work examines issues of 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 use of non-trial resolutions, such as deferred prosecution agreements and victim-centred settlements. She has 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, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Council on International Law. From 2010-2015, she served as an associate dean with the now-named Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and in 2016, she was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. 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. From 2022 to 2025, she served as the associate dean research for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, adding in 2023, the role of special advisor to the Vice-President (Research and Innovation).
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. Media mentions include The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, CBC News, The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Maclean’s.
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 previously spent two years on secondment 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 twice served as a member of Canada's official delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. She has also 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). Before becoming an academic, she worked as the legal adviser for a prominent member of Britain's House of Lords on the enactment of the Human Rights Act, the creation of a Scottish Parliament, and the implementation of the Northern Ireland peace agreement.
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.
Honours include 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).
Courses
LAW 506 - Public International Law
A survey of the foundational principles, structure and institutions of public international law, including the nature of the international legal system, the sources of international law, and the relevance of international law to the Canadian legal system. The role of international organizations, such as the United Nations, will also be discussed.