The Law Faculty’s research and teaching complement continues to grow. Joining the school’s roster of exceptional scholars this summer are Benjamin Ewing, Alyssa King, Sabine Tsuruda and Noah Weisbord.

“I am delighted to announce these four appointments, all outstanding additions to Queen’s Law,” says Dean Bill Flanagan. “We are on track this year to see our see our faculty complement grow to 39 members, a remarkable 30 per cent increase since 2015.” 

Joshua Karton, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, adds, “I am so excited for these brilliant researchers to join the Queen’s Law community. All four have already earned international recognition in their respective fields. Here at Queen’s, they are poised to make special contributions to areas of traditional research strength, like criminal law and labour and employment law, and also to areas where Queen’s has more recently established clusters of research excellence, like legal theory and international law.”

Benjamin Ewing, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University School of Law, earned his JD from Yale Law School, where he was a Coker Fellow, and his PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow in the University Center for Human Values. In his doctoral dissertation, “Punishing Disadvantage: Culpability, Opportunity, and Responsibility,” he argued that social disadvantages can deprive people of a fair opportunity to avoid morally culpable crime and thereby give them a claim to mitigation at sentencing. Ewing hopes ultimately to develop a general theory of fair opportunity to avoid punishment and to explore its implications for sentencing, policing, criminal procedure and substantive criminal law. He has authored or co-authored articles published in the Yale Law Journal, Law and Philosophy, the Journal of Tort Law, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence.

Alyssa King will come to Queen’s from Yale Law School, where she is a PhD candidate and a Resident Fellow with the school’s Information Society Project, earned a JD, and was an executive editor of the Yale Journal of International Law and a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Master 2 from Paris’s L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She writes on civil procedure and comparative law, discussing the intersection of normative systems through mechanisms such as federalism, arbitration and the reception of international law. Of particular interest to her is how different adjudicators define their roles and in access to justice. A member of the New York Bar, she previously clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York.

Sabine Tsuruda, a Predoctoral Fellow in Law and Philosophy at the UCLA School of Law, is completing a PhD in Philosophy as part of UCLA’s Joint JD/PhD Program in Law and Philosophy. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, she completed her JD studies at UCLA, where she served as a senior editor of the UCLA Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif. In her doctoral dissertation, “Moral Agency and the Workplace,” she develops a moral theory for legal regulation of labour and production in light of workers’ interests in exercising freedoms of association and expression. For this work, she won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship. Tsuruda also has research interests in contract theory and the morality of donative practices, and she has taught courses in the UCLA Philosophy Department. Her recent work has been published in the South Carolina Law Review and The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics.

Noah Weisbord, who is currently a Visiting Professor at Queen’s Law, will join the Faculty as an Associate Professor. A leading expert on the crime of aggression, which involves individual criminal responsibility for aggressive war, he assisted diplomatic delegations to define the crime. His research focuses on the role of the criminal law in managing, reflecting or exacerbating intergroup conflict. In a current project, he is examining self-defence in Canadian criminal law from historical, comparative and conceptual perspectives. His scholarly articles have appeared in such publications as the Harvard International Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law and Law and Contemporary Problems, and his op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the National Post. His monograph on the crime of aggression is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2018. Weisbord earned an SJD and an LLM from Harvard Law School, and received LLB, BCL, MSW and BSc degrees from McGill University.  

This year’s faculty hiring is not yet complete. Further announcements are anticipated, including those for the Sigurdson Professorship in Corporate Law and Finance, and the Queen’s National Scholar in Legal and Political Philosophy.

Watch for stories on each faculty appointee in late spring.

By Aschille Clarke-Mendes