Staff & Faculty Directory

Erez Aloni’s primary research interests lie in the legal regulation of adult relationships and complex family structures. His work stages the family as an institution affected by a broad range of laws, norms, and economic structures; he is particularly interested in distributional results of legal regulation of the household and the intersection of private law with family law. Aloni’s projects have explored the emerging menu of options for legal recognition of relationships and whether they protect the interests of the economically weaker partner.

Efrat Arbel is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia Peter A. Allard School of Law. She publishes and teaches in refugee law, prison law, constitutional law, and tort law. Her primary research examines how legal rights are negotiated and defined in liminal legal spaces like the border, the detention center, and the prison.

Joel Bakan writes and researches in the areas of Constitutional Law, socio-legal studies, legal theory and economic law. He has law degrees from Oxford, Dalhousie, and Harvard. He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and served as Law Clerk in 1985 for Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada  He joined the Law Faculty in 1990 as Associate Professor after a year's visit from Osgoode Hall Law School, where he had been Assistant Professor since 1987.  Professor Bakan teaches Constitutional Law, Contracts, socio-legal courses and the graduate seminar.  

Patricia M. Barkaskas is Métis from Alberta. Her research focuses on the intersection of justice and law, including access to justice, clinical legal education, and decolonizing and Indigenizing law. She is particularly interested in examining the value of Indigenous pedagogies in experiential learning, clinical legal education, and skills-based legal training, and disrupting the normative violence of colonial legal education.

Janine Benedet joined the law school faculty in 2005 and currently serves as Dean pro tem. Her first stop after her L.L.B. graduation from UBC was a clerkship with fellow UBC alumnus Justice Frank Iacobucci at the Supreme Court of Canada. That was followed by graduate studies – leading to both an LL.M. and an S.J.D. – at the University of Michigan, where she also taught as a Visiting Faculty Fellow. She practiced labour law in Toronto from 1997 to 1999, and was a member of faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School from 1999-2005.

Prior to joining Allard Law, Brenna was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at the Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa).

Brian Bird’s primary research interests are constitutional law and theory, interactions between courts and legislatures, jurisprudence, philosophy of law, legal history, and bills of rights.

Before joining Allard Law, Brian was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. At Princeton, Brian was also a lecturer in Politics.