Queen’s Law is reinforcing its position as a national leader in influential research and innovative legal teaching with the promotion of two faculty members, effective July 1.
Associate Professor Josh Karton will receive full professor status, while Assistant Professor Alyssa King will receive associate professor status and be awarded tenure.
“We are extremely proud of Professors Karton and King,” says Dean Colleen M. Flood. “These promotions mark a significant milestone in their academic careers, and we recognize their outstanding achievements, and those of our entire faculty community, in advancing our school’s academic mission and research footprint.”
Karton, who joined Queen’s Law in 2009, currently serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Program Development. He teaches and writes about commercial dispute resolution (especially international arbitration), international and comparative contract law, international economic law, transnational legal theory, globalization and law, and linguistic issues in law.
He has written or edited four books and dozens of articles. His sociology of the international arbitration field, The Culture of International Arbitration and the Evolution of Contract Law, was published in 2013 to great acclaim in the academic and practitioner press. He is currently a co-lead investigator on the largest-ever empirical study of international commercial arbitration practice, The Social and Psychological Underpinnings of Commercial Arbitration in Europe, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. His book Research Methods for Contract Law and Scholarship is forthcoming in September, and he is currently at work on a SSHRC-funded monograph entitled Contracts All the Way Down: A Contractarian Theory of Arbitration Law.
A proficient speaker of French and Chinese, Karton has held visiting positions at several universities globally, most recently in 2022-2023 as the Tsai Wan-Tsai Visiting Chair Professor of International Law at the National Taiwan University College of Law.
Winner of a Queen’s Law Students’ Society Award for Teaching Excellence, he is passionately dedicated to teaching, including graduate supervision. He has coached teams with the Vis Moot at four different universities to prize-winning results.
Aside from his scholarly activities, Karton practises as an independent arbitrator and legal consultant. He has been appointed as a sole arbitrator and tribunal chair in domestic Canadian and international arbitrations, both ad hoc and institutional, and acts as an expert witness on matters of international and domestic arbitration and contract law.
Read more about Josh Karton.
King, who joined the Faculty of Law in 2018, studies courts and comparative procedure. She is particularly interested in instances of borrowing between legal systems and between public court systems and arbitration. Her research encompasses questions of adjudicator role, access to justice, and federalism.
Representative publications include “Traveling Judges” (with Pamela K. Bookman, 2022), American Journal of International Law; “Global Civil Procedure” (2021), Harvard International Law Journal; and “Arbitration and the Federal Balance” (2019), Indiana Law Journal. Her article “Ethics for Traveling Judges” (University of Toronto Law Journal) is forthcoming this year.
King was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant in 2020 (with Pamela K. Bookman) for “Travelling Judges, Moonlighting Arbitrators, and Global Common Law” and was part of a research team awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant in 2024 (with PI Suzanne Chiodo and co-applicant Gerard Kennedy) for “Fighting the Backlog: How Ontario’s Courts are Using Summary Processes to Address Civil Justice Delays.”
Beyond her role as a scholar, King teaches civil procedure and contracts. She was recognized for her commitment to student success this year with a Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching, established as a joint initiative of the Faculty of Law and the Law Students' Society.
In addition to supervising students and acting in numerous roles of service for Queen’s Law, King is an active member of several professional societies, serving on the American Society of Comparative Law’s Younger Comparativists Committee (previously treasurer and scholarship committee chair) and as a general rapporteur for the Académie internationale du droit compare / International Academy of Comparative Law.
Read more about Alyssa King.
By Tracy Weaver