Event Description
Join the Canadian Network of Law and the Humanities (CNLH) for a talk and discussion of humanistic and arts-based approaches to law scholarship with Professor Godwin Dzah.
The doctrinaire approach to law research dominates legal research including in international law. Nonetheless, non-doctrinal approaches now enjoy an ever-expanding recognition and acceptance in law research. Using international environmental law research as a point of reference, this talk explores the legal normativity embedded in non-legal sources including history, sociology, and cultural anthropology. This dramaturgical analysis traces the speaker’s own path in past and present works by demonstrating how these sources that are frequently labelled as non-law are troves of law, and how a change in perspective is necessary in thinking about their place in international law research.
Speaker
Godwin Dzah is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. His teaching and research interests include public, international, comparative and environmental law. His works have been published in edited volumes and in leading peer-reviewed law journals including the Ocean Yearbook, the African Journal of International and Comparative Law, the African Human Rights Law Journal and the Canadian Yearbook of International Law.
Prior to joining Allard Law, Professor Dzah was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. Dzah also completed a United Nations-Nippon Foundation Fellowship at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University and the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea of the Office of Legal Affairs at the United Nations Secretariat in New York. He previously taught and practised law in Ghana, and consults locally and internationally for government agencies, international organizations, and research institutions on law, environment, and development.
He holds a BA (Political Science) and an LLB (post-first degree in law) from the University of Ghana, a Qualifying Certificate in Law from the Ghana School of Law, a Master of Laws degree from the Harvard Law School, and a doctorate in law from the University of British Columbia. He has received several awards including the John Peters Humphrey Fellowship (the Canadian Council on International Law), the Charles Bourne Graduate Scholarship in International Law, and the Dean of Law Doctoral Thesis Prize (the University of British Columbia). He is the author of Sustainable Development, International Law, and a Turn to African Legal Cosmologies (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2025 Certificate of Merit for a Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship by the American Society of International Law.
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