Research Associates

James Allan

James Allan holds the oldest named chair at the University of Queensland where he is the Garrick Professor of Law.  He is a native born Canadian who practised law at a large firm in Toronto and then at the Bar in London before moving to teach law in Hong Kong, New Zealand and then Australia.  He has had sabbaticals at the Cornell Law School and the University of San Diego School of Law in the US and at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Dalhousie Law School in Canada (where he was the Bertha Wilson Visiting Professor of Human Rights), and at King’s College Law School in London. Allan has published widely in the areas of constitutional law, legal philosophy and bill of rights scepticism.  In 2014 he published his book Democracy in Decline, aimed at the educated layperson.  In 2016 he edited and contributed to Making Australia Right, a collection of essays on the poor state of Australia’s right-of-centre government – revisited in the 2020 Keeping Australia Right book which he co-edited.  Allan also has two new books coming out soon, one tentatively titled A Doubter’s Guide to Constitutionalism in Modern Democracies and the other (co-authored with three Americans) provisionally titled A Principled Constitution: Four Skeptical Essays. Allan also writes regularly for weeklies and monthlies including being a weekly contributor to The Spectator Australia, a semi-regular one to Quadrant, and an occasional one to The Australian, to Canada’s National Post, to the US’s Law & Liberty and to Britain’s The Conservative Woman.  He was elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in 2011.  As a majoritarian democrat he was absolutely delighted by the Brexit vote.  And as a conservative law professor he has spent almost all of his working life in orthodox left institutions. 

Dennis Baker

Dennis Baker is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Guelph.  He is the author of Not Quite Supreme: The Courts and Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).  His research interests include the separation of powers, criminal justice policy, and the politics of private law.  His work has appeared in the Review of Constitutional Studies, Canadian Public Administration, and the Supreme Court Law Review.  He is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Calgary.

Brian Bird

Brian Bird is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. Before joining Allard Law, Brian was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. At Princeton, Brian was also a lecturer in Politics. Brian’s academic writing has appeared in several academic journals and his writing on current affairs has appeared in a variety of media outlets. Brian has co-edited two books on Canadian constitutional law: The Forgotten Fundamental Freedoms of the Charter (2020) and Forgotten Foundations of the Canadian Constitution (2022). Brian clerked for judges of the Supreme Court of British Columbia and for the Honourable Justice Andromache Karakatsanis at the Supreme Court of Canada. He completed his doctorate at McGill University. He also holds degrees from the University of Oxford, the University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University.

Crandall

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Keith Culver

Keith Culver is Professor of Management, Associate Dean for Regional Innovation Practice, and Director of UBC’s Survive and Thrive Applied Research initiative. He completed his doctoral studies under Wil Waluchow, Joseph Raz, and Sir Neil MacCormick. Originally educated as a legal theorist, his current work focuses on the intersection of law, public safety, and national security. Representative publications include: Culver and Giudice, The Unsteady State, Cambridge, 2017; Culver and Giudice, Legality’s Borders, Oxford 2010; Culver and Giudice, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Law, 3^rd edn, Broadview 2017; Culver, Giudice and Bickenbach, eds., Canadian Cases in the Philosophy of Law, Broadview, 2019.

Rosalind Dixon

Rosalind Dixon is a Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney.  She teaches and researches in the field of comparative constitutional law.  She previously served as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School and the National University of Singapore. She is the immediate past co-president of the International Society of Public Law: https://www.icon-society.org/ and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Arts and Social Sciences.

Brad Epperly

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Thomas Heilke

Thomas Heilke is Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Duke University in 1990. He has held a variety of administrative positions at UBC and at the University of Kansas, where he was on faculty for 23 years before coming to UBC. He is author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 45+ publications in the areas of political theory, politics and religion, and international relations, including Voegelin on the Idea of Race (1990); Great Ideas/Grand Schemes: Political Ideologies in the 19th and Twentieth Centuries (1996); Nietzsche’s Tragic Regime: Culture, Aesthetics, and Political Education (1998); Eric Voegelin: The Quest for Reality (1999); Persons in Politics: Studies in Empirical Political Science (2013); and, Hunting and Weaving: Essays on Empirical Political Science (2013). Venues for his published articles have included: The American Political Science Review; Review of Politics; Political Theory; Interpretation; and, Modern Theology. His current research is focussed on the roles of religious beliefs and practices in domestic, international, and world politics; the nature and secular functions of modern, post-modern, and nonmodern political theologies; and, pluralism and suffering.

Rainer Knopff

A professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, Rainer Knopff has written widely on public law, human rights, conservation, and Canadian political thought. His books include The Charter Revolution and the Court Party and Charter Politics (both with F.L. Morton), Human Rights and Social Technology: The New War on Discrimination (with T.E. Flanagan), and Parameters of Power: Canada’s Political Institutions (with Keith Archer, Roger Gibbins, and Leslie A. Pal). Knopff has consulted for the federal and provincial governments, been an expert witness in court cases, and served on the federal electoral boundaries commission for Alberta. He was part of the Consultation Committee that advised the appointment of David Johnston as Governor General of Canada.

Hoi Kong

Hoi Kong is the inaugural holder of The Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, P.C., UBC Professorship in Constitutional Law, which he assumed in 2018.  He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Program on Comparative Constitutional Studies and a Peter Wall Scholar (2020-2021).  He researches and teaches in the areas of constitutional, administrative, municipal and comparative law, and constitutional and public law theory.  Professor Kong co-directs with Professor Ron Levy (the Australian National University) the Project on Deliberative Governance and Law.  He also directs a research axis at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal and is on the editorial boards of the Review of Constitutional Studies and American Journal of Comparative Law, as well as the international board of distinguished advisors for the Federal Law Review. 

Levy

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Manfred

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Blair Major

Blair Major is an assistant professor at the Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law, where he teaches courses on Administrative Law, Remedies, Legal Foundations, and Law and Religion. Dr. Major’s primary area of research and writing is on the topic of law and religion, in both the Canadian and international contexts. His scholarship includes a mix of legal theory and substantive doctrinal analysis. Dr. Major holds law degrees from the University of Alberta and McGill University. He is also a member of the Law Society of Alberta.

Barrie McCullough

Barrie McCollough attended the University of Alberta beginning in 1962, studying philosophy under the tutelage of Terry Penelhum, John Heintz and Plato Mamo. He subsequently took a Master’s degree at Harvard University in 1968 before going to Oxford University where he completed his B.Litt. in philosophy in 1973, studying under Patrick Gardiner and D.F. Pears. In 1987 he completed a Ph.D. in constitutional law and government under William Letwin at the London School of Economics. Subsequently he published papers with The Pepperdine Law Review, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Australian Journal of Political Science, The European Legacy, and Skepsis. In addition he has published works in political ideologies with Oxford University Press (Canada). His teaching included positions at the University of Alberta, the University of Calgary, Okanagan University College, and the University of British Columbia. One of his most prized achievements was assisting in the establishment of the PPE Program at UBCO. His present areas of interest comprise Canadian constitutional issues and specific issues in epistemology and metaphysics. From 2005 to 2011 he was the UBCO faculty representative on the UBC Board of Governors. Upon retirement he taught for several months at the Beijing Foreign Studies University in its Canadian Studies Program.

Munz-Fraticelli

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Dwight Newman

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Noriko Ozawa

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Emmanuelle Richez

Emmanuelle Richez is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor. Her research examines law and politics in Canada, with a current focus on official language rights. She is a federally appointed member of the Official Languages Rights Expert Panel of the Court Challenges Program of Canada. Emmanuelle is a researcher affiliated with the Centre d’analyse politique – Constitution et fédéralisme of UQAM and the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Comparatives sur les Constitutions, les Libertés et l’État of the Université de Bordeaux. She is also a board member of the Canadian Study of Parliament Group. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from McGill University, as well as a Master’s degree from Université Laval and a B.A. from the University of Ottawa in the same discipline.

Riddell

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Halina Sapeha

Halina Sapeha is an Assistant Professor of International Law and Politics in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. Her academic background is interdisciplinary and includes political science, law, European studies, international relations, and comparative public policy. Halina has conducted quantitative and qualitative research at the University of Victoria, United Nations University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Toronto Metropolitan University, and McMaster University. Multilingual, she previously held posts in international agencies and think tanks throughout Europe, and worked on surveys in Canada and abroad for COMPAS Research. Halina’s research interests lie in global governance, international law, and evidence-informed policy-making.

Scholtz

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Roger Shiner

Roger A. Shiner is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science at UBC Okanagan, and an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, the University of Alberta. He taught at the U of A from 1964 to 1999, and at UBCO and Okanagan College from 2002 to 2018. Although he started his career as a classicist working in Ancient Philosophy, since 1975 his main area of teaching and research has been Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law. He has also taught and published in Business Ethics, and taught Social and Political Philosophy, Computer Ethics and Criminal Justice Ethics. His books include Norm and Nature: The Movements of Legal Thought (OUP 1992), Freedom of Commercial Expression (OUP 2003) and Legal Institutions and the Sources of Law (Springer 2005). He has published widely in law reviews and philosophy journals. He has held a Killam Senior Fellowship (1992-94), an H.L.A. Hart Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University (2006), and the position of Virtual Scholar in Residence at the Law Commission of Canada (2005-06). Most recently his research has been in the foundations of criminal law, especially with respect to corporate criminal liability.

Manuela Ungureanu

Manuela Ungureanu is a philosopher of language working in literacy and translation studies.
A graduate of the University of Bucharest, Manuela earned her PhD from McGill University, where she wrote her PhD thesis on Chomsky’s critique of traditional theories of linguistic meaning and language mastery. In articles published more recently, she defends a broader theory of language so as to accommodate empirical data from cultural anthropology and developmental psychology, including those concerning specific meta-awareness skills children develop when exposed to literacy artifacts. She is the author of “A momentous triangle: ontology, methodology and phenomenology in the philosophy of language. In Romanian Studies in the Philosophy of Science, I. Parvu, G. Sandu, I. D. Toader (eds.). Springer, 2015, and “Olson’s Domestication of Goody’s Literacy Hypothesis; (How) Can philosophers of language help? In Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, 2020. Manuela is currently principal investigator for a research project funded by SSHRC, and entitled “Confounding Freedoms: Academic Life at a Sovietized University and the Perks of Translation during Communism”, examining in what sense a historical account of knowledge production in non-democratic societies, such as those from the former Soviet Bloc, needs to deploy concepts such as academic freedom or freedom of speech.

Grégoire Webber

Grégoire Webber is Canada Research Chair in Public Law and Philosophy of Law at Queen’s Law, cross-appointed to the Department of Philosophy, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research is in the areas of human rights, public law, and philosophy of law. A graduate of McGill University with bachelors of civil law and common law and of the University of Oxford with a doctorate in law, where he studied as a Trudeau scholar, Professor Webber clerked for Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada, was senior policy advisor with the Privy Council Office, and was Legal Affairs Advisor to the Attorney General of Canada and Minister of Justice. He is joint founder and Executive Director of the Supreme Court Advocacy Institute, which provides free advocacy advice to counsel appearing before the Supreme Court of Canada. For his role in co-founding the Institute, he was awarded a Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General of Canada.

Helen Yanacopulos

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Emmett Macfarlane

Emmett Macfarlane is a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo whose research focuses on the intersection of governance, constitutional law, and public policy. He is the author of Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role (UBC Press, 2013) and Constitutional Pariah: Reference re Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament (UBC Press, 2021), and the editor of Constitutional Amendment in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016), Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution (University of Toronto Press, 2018), and Dilemmas of Free Expression (University of Toronto Press, 2022). He has published over 30 journal articles and book chapters in outlets including the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Canadian Journal of Political Science, McGill Law Journal, Supreme Court Law Review, and International Political Science Review.

Maxime St-Hilaire

Maxime St-Hilaire holds a doctorate in law (LLD) from Laval University and is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at Université de Sherbrooke, where he teaches constitutional law and legal philosophy. In 2021, he won this University’s research and creation award, in the human sciences category, for his book titled Les Positivismes juridiques au XXe siècle. Normativismes, sociologismes, réalismes (PUL, 2020). In 2014, he won the ‘’Prix Minerve 2014’’ award for his book titled La lutte pour la pleine reconnaissance des droits ancestraux: problématique juridique et enquête philosophique (Yvon Blais, 2015). He co-edited, with Joanna Baron, the book/special-issue Attacks on the Rule of Law from Within (Lexis/SCLR, 2019), and edited a special issue on the German philosopher “Axel Honneth and the Law” for Droit et Société in 2011. Professor St-Hilaire has published more than thirty five articles and chapters, among numerous other publications in scholarly and media sources, and given more than sixty talks around the world. He visited numerous research centres and universities, among which the Marc Bloch Centre (Berlin), the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (Oslo), the Louvain Global College of Law (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), and SciencePo’s Law School (Paris). While a doctoral student, he served as law clerk to the hon. Marie Deschamps J., at the Supreme Court of Canada (2009-10), after an internship at the Venice Commission (2007-8).

Emmett Macfarlane

Emmett Macfarlane is a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo whose research focuses on the intersection of governance, constitutional law, and public policy. He is the author of Governing from the Bench: The Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Role (UBC Press, 2013) and Constitutional Pariah: Reference re Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament (UBC Press, 2021), and the editor of Constitutional Amendment in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016), Policy Change, Courts, and the Canadian Constitution (University of Toronto Press, 2018), and Dilemmas of Free Expression (University of Toronto Press, 2022). He has published over 30 journal articles and book chapters in outlets including the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Canadian Journal of Political Science, McGill Law Journal, Supreme Court Law Review, and International Political Science Review.