Today Queen’s Law advanced its position as a national leader in innovative legal teaching and influential research with the promotion of eight faculty members. As part of the 2024 faculty promotions that take effect July 1, five associate professors have achieved full professor status, and three members have been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor.
These appointments reflect the law school’s dynamic expertise across multiple areas of legal study. From examining global conflicts and international law to framing important issues around climate justice, human rights, equality in the justice system, Indigenous reconciliation, artificial intelligence, business law in a rapidly changing international economy, and more.
The Faculty’s transformative research is shaping the modern legal system, informing jurists, court decisions, public policy initiatives, and is driving innovation in the legal sector. The impact of this research is put into action every day in classrooms across the law school as Queen’s Law prepares its exceptional students for the future of legal research, practice, and advocacy.
“We are extremely proud to have such a vibrant, committed, and accomplished research and teaching community at Queen’s Law,” said Dean Colleen M. Flood. “These appointments mark a significant milestone in the academic careers of this year’s recipients. Today we recognize their outstanding achievements, and those of our entire faculty community, in advancing our school’s academic mission and research footprint.”
The 2024 faculty promotions include:
Sharry Aiken, Professor
Professor Aiken’s primary area of research concentration focuses on migration law in socio-legal context. Her scholarship engages with the controversies and complexities posed by immigration and border security measures as well as the impact of these measures on migrants and the communities they have established in Canada. A special issue of Citizenship Studies on detention abolition, a co-edited book published by Routledge, and a co-authored article “Narratives of Harm and the Case for Detention Abolition” published in Mondi Migranti, are recent examples of her pathbreaking work.
Professor Aiken has been awarded external funding for 16 discrete research and/or knowledge mobilization initiatives. She is a frequent commentator in national media and has been pro bono counsel in precedent-setting test case litigation.
Aiken teaches Administrative Law, Law & Poverty, Immigration law, International Refugee Law, Public International Law and International Human Rights Law. She was Associate Dean (Graduate Studies & Research) and has a distinguished record of graduate supervision in both Law and Cultural Studies. In 2019, she was appointed Academic Director of the Graduate Diploma in Immigration and Citizenship Law and has been a guiding hand in the program’s development.
Over the course of her career, Professor Aiken has been deeply invested in community engagement and service. She is a past president of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), and an active member of the CCR’s legal affairs committee. In 2023 she was appointed president of FCJ Refugee Centre. She is co-editor-in-chief of the PKI Global Justice Journal.
Read more about Professor Aiken.
Bita Amani is Co-Director of Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s (FLSQ) and is active in the fields of intellectual property, AI and algorithmic errors; tech governance and sustainable development; information privacy; food law and policy; equality and feminist legal studies; and the governance of knowledge and innovation, including traditional, cultural, and medical knowledge. Her scholarship is informed by critical sociological perspectives with an emphasis on social justice, law, and policy reform, examined through an equity, diversity, inclusivity, Indigenization, and accountability lens.
Professor Amani is committed to student success beyond the classroom. She has supervised over 35 independent JD projects, as well as LLM and PhD students in Law, and has served as a faculty coach and supervisor for national and international moot competitions. Her research has earned her national and international recognition. She is currently working on a number of government-funded projects including as a collaborator on the NSERC NFRF "Triage-Bot: an AI-powered Assistive Triage Framework", and as a co-applicant on an SSHRC $2.5 million/7yr Partnership grant: What About the Families? Strengthening a families research ecosystem for defence and public safety sectors.
Dr. Amani has published numerous articles, book chapters, and four books, including most recently a co-edited volume published earlier this year: The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals. This volume examines how IP law interacts with, influences, and impacts each of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and includes her chapter on SDG 10 to reduce inequality within and among countries.
She is looking forward to expanding her equality-focused work on intellectual property and the Sustainable Development Goals while on sabbatical as an Academic Visitor to the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford in 2025.
Read more about Professor Amani.
Mohamed Khimji, Professor
Mohamed Khimji is the inaugural holder of the David Allgood Professorship in Business Law. He has also served in a number of senior leadership roles at Queen’s Law, including as the Director of the Queen’s Business Law Program and Associate Deans for Academic Policy and Graduate Studies. His strategic academic leadership has been instrumental in advancing the Faculty’s academic goals and objectives.
In the 2024/25 academic year, Professor Khimji will introduce an exciting new course, Law (Taylor’s Version), which has garnered national media attention. This innovative course will explore Taylor Swift’s significant impact on entertainment law, delving into her high-profile legal disputes and business decisions.
Professor Khimji’s research spans various facets of corporate and commercial law, including the proprietary aspects of international financial markets, corporate governance, the power dynamics between shareholders and boards of directors, the separate legal personality of corporations, limited shareholder liability, and the wealth effects of secured financing.
He has provided expert consultation on these topics to private law firms, government bodies, and regulatory agencies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Before his academic career, he practiced corporate law at Torys LLP in Toronto.
Read more about Professor Khimji.
Cherie Metcalf, Professor
Cherie Metcalf is an expert in law, policy, and economics, who teaches Public Law, Constitutional Law, Law and Economics, andInternational Environmental and Resource Law. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she is also Associate Dean of Research at Queen’s Law and has a cross-appointment with the Department of Economics.
Drawing on her graduate training in economics, she uses empirical methods to study Indigenous rights, including the Supreme Court’s s. 35 Aboriginal rights cases, considering impacts on governance, rights holders, and resource industry participants. She also studies issues in environmental and resource law, including her project “Institutions for Effective Climate Change Action.” In December 2023, she convened leading legal scholars from Canada and the U.S. for a conference titled “Institutions for Effective Climate Action: An International & Comparative Perspective.”
Her research has been published in leading academic journals, nationally and internationally, including the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the International Review of Law & Economics. She has been asked to present her research around the world including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Northwestern University Law School, University of Texas, Georgetown, Cornell, Florida State University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Western University, and the Harvard-Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum. She is a two-time recipient of the Vanderkamp prize for best paper in Canadian Public Policy and has recently received grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research.
Read more about Professor Metcalf.
Michael G. Pratt, Professor
Michael Pratt, who has a cross-appointment with the Department of Philosophy, teaches a range of courses in private law, including Contracts, Torts, Remedies, and Land Transactions. His research is concerned with the private law of obligations. and he has written widely on the law of contract, real estate transactions, the law of damages, and the philosophical foundations of voluntary obligations. His latest work, Termination and Rescission of Agreements for the Purchase and Sale of Land (LexisNexis, 2023), is a comprehensive treatment of the law governing termination and rescission of land transactions in response to breach, repudiation, title deficiencies, misrepresentation, and the failure of conditions precedent.
Read more about Professor Pratt.
Benjamin Ewing, Associate Professor
Benjamin Ewing is a legal theorist whose scholarship centers around the moral and political foundations of criminal law, especially the relationship between criminal justice and social justice. He is particularly interested in how the criminal law should treat offenders from unfairly disadvantaged backgrounds and how a society might realize the ideal of giving everyone a fair opportunity to avoid becoming a perpetrator or victim of crime. In much of his work to date, he has attempted to enlarge our conception of what it means to have a fair opportunity to avoid punishment. In future writing he intends also to reflect on the limits of the “fair opportunity” paradigm of criminal justice, and the need to supplement it with additional principles of political morality, such as social solidarity.
Ewing’s recent publications include “Reconstructing Gladue” (with Lisa Kerr) (University of Toronto Law Journal), “Do Unjust States Have the Standing to Blame? Three Reservations About Scepticism” (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies), “Mass Incarceration as Distributive Injustice” (The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, edited by Matthew C. Altman), and a review of Tommie Shelby’s The Idea of Prison Abolition (Mind).
Read more about Professor Ewing.
Ardi Imseis, Associate Professor
Ardi Imseis is a scholar-practitioner of public international law. He joined Queen’s Law in 2018 following a 12-year career as a United Nations official in the Middle East. Since leaving the UN, Imseis has continued to engage in high-level public advocacy on international law, peace and security, including a number of invited addresses to the UN Security Council. He has appeared as legal counsel before the International Court of Justice and has served as a Member of the UN commission of inquiry on the war in Yemen.
At Queen’s Law, he serves as the Academic Director of the International Law Programs that Queen's Law offers at Bader College, Herstmonceux Castle in the United Kingdom. His scholarship focuses on general public international law and various subsidiary disciplines, including state responsibility, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international refugee law and international criminal law. His work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and the University of British Columbia Law Review, and others.
His first book, titled The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2023.
Read more about Professor Imseis.
Sabine Tsuruda, Associate Professor
Sabine Tsuruda is a legal philosopher who writes on workers’ rights. She graduated from the Joint JD/PhD Program in Law and Philosophy at UCLA, where she studied as a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow and served as a Senior Editor of the UCLA Law Review. She also holds a BA in Political Science and a MA in Philosophy from Stanford University.
Tsuruda’s research addresses issues in legal doctrine that concern social equality and moral agency, including employees’ speech and associational rights, the morality of legal norms of managerial control, equality in religious workplaces, contract law and distributive justice. Her research examines how burdens and restrictions on employees’ speech and associational freedoms can also constitute wrongful workplace inequality.
Read more about Professor Tsuruda.
Applications for the 2024 recipients were supported by external referees who are national and international leaders in their respective fields. The review process is grounded in peer review, including contributions from members of the Queen’s Law community.