Catherine Dauvergne, KC

Professor Dauvergne has been working in the area of refugee, immigration, and citizenship law over the past quarter of a century.  For a decade she held the Canada Research in Migration Law.  In 2012, Dauvergne was named a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in recognition of her contributions to public discourse in Canada. In 2019 she was honoured with a Queen’s Counsel designation. She has written three books that take a broad perspective on the theoretical underpinnings of the interrelated fields that comprise border law, including considering how human rights principles and discourses fit into a migration and citizenship framework. Dauvergne is also an editor or co-author of five other volumes, including Canada’s immigration and refugee law casebook.  Much of Dauvergne’s work engages feminist critique of the law, and the place of women in immigration, refugee, and citizenship laws. Catherine Dauvergne served as the eighth dean of the Peter A. Allard School of Law from 2015-2020.

Research and Publications

To learn more about my research, please visit my PURE Research profile. You can also access my works on the following sites: 

• Allard Research Commons / bepress Legal Repository Search
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
• HeinOnline

• Introduction to Public Law & the Charter
• Transnational Law
• Refugee Law
• Immigration Law
• PhD Seminar
• Jessup Moot

Books

• The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Humanitarianism, Identity and Nation: Migration Laws of Australia and Canada, UBC, 2005,.
• Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration, Edward Elgar Press, editor, 2021.
• Gender in Refugee Law: From the Margins to the Centre, Routledge, 2014 (co-edited with Efrat Arbel, Jenni Millbank)
• Jurisprudence for an Interconnected Globe, Ashgate Press, 2003 (editor)
• Gendering Canada’s Refugee Process, Status of Women Canada, 2006 (lead author with Agnes Huang and Leonora Angeles)
• Immigration and Refugee Law Cases, Materials and Commentary, Emond Montgomery, 2014, co-authored with Aiken, Galloway and Macklin, 2^nd edition, 2014, and with Aiken, Grey, Liew, Heckman and Mackintosh, 3^rd edition, 2020.
• Flourishing: A Plan to Strengthen Public Legal Education and Information, report commissioned by the Law Foundation of British Columbia, June 2025 (148 pages), co-authored with Aara Johnson and Shannon Srivastava.

Recent Works

• “Towards a Theoretical Account of the Refugee in International Law” (2025) 37:2 International Journal of Refugee Law 151-174.
• “The Banality of Crimmigration: Can Immigration Law Recover Itself” (2025) 14 Laws 1-15.
• “The risks to refugee law of humanitarian responses to flight from Ukraine” 2024 International Affairs, 100 (1) 283-299.
• “New Crossroads and the Opportunity of a Crisis: The State of Canadian Legal Education” 2023 Canadian Bar Review, 101 (3) 708-740.