Victor V. Ramraj

Professor
Director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives


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Victor V. Ramraj


T: 1-250-721-7024

Faculty of Law
University of Victoria
PO Box 1700, STN CSC
Victoria, BC  V8W 2Y2
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Victor V. Ramraj joined the University of Victoria as Professor of Law and CAPI Chair in Asia-Pacific Legal Relations in 2014, and was appointed Director of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI) in 2017. Before coming to Victoria, he spent sixteen years at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he twice served as the Faculty’s Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs. He was also twice seconded to the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS), a consortium of global law schools in London, where he served for one year as its co-director. Professor Ramraj holds five degrees from McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Queen’s University Belfast, served as a judicial law clerk at the Federal Court of Appeal in Ottawa and as a litigation lawyer in Toronto, and remains a non-practicing membership in the Law Society of Upper Canada. He has held visiting teaching appointments at Chulalongkorn University, Kyushu University, and the University of Toronto.

Professor Ramraj has edited/co-edited several books published by Cambridge University Press, including Emergencies and the Limits of Legality (2009) and Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the Limits of Legality (2010). His work has been published in leading journals around the world, including Chicago-Kent Law ReviewHong Kong Law Journal, ICON: International Journal of Constitutional LawSingapore Journal of Legal Studies, South African Journal on Human RightsTilburg Law Review, and Transnational Legal Theory. His latest edited collection is entitled Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

His research interests include comparative constitutional and administrative law, transnational regulation, emergency powers, and the history of and regulatory challenges arising from state-company relationships in Asia. He is a regular participant in international workshops on comparative constitutional and administrative law. He has organized international conferences in Canada and Asia, as well as panels, workshops, and roundtables, including CAPI's Roundtable Series on Southeast Asia in Global Context. Professor Ramraj was the Principal Investigator on a multi-year Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarships - Advanced Scholars (QES-AS) research project, Regulating Globalization in South and Southeast Asia, with collaborators in Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. He is working on a book entitled Law in the World: Creative Legal Thinking for Complexity and Crisis.

  • BA – McGill
  • MA – University of Toronto
  • LLB – University of Toronto
  • LLM – Queen's University Belfast
  • PhD – University of Toronto

Books

  • Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020)
  • Amartya Sen and Law: Philosophers and Law (London/New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2019) (co-edited with C. Menkel-Meadow, S. Routh, and A.K. Thiruvengadam)
  • Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the Limits of Legality (Cambridge University Press, 2010) (co-edited with Arun K. Thiruvengadam)
  • Emergencies and the Limits of Legality (ed.)(Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Articles and Chapters

  • ‘Lex Mercatoria, Legal Pluralism, and the Modern State through the Lens of the East India Company, 1600-1757’, 40(2) Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (co-authored with Neilesh Bose) (forthcoming 2020).
  • ‘International Institutional Bypasses and Transnational Non-State Regulation’ (2019) 10 Transnational Legal Theory 295-317. 
  • ‘Security, Human Rights, and Nationalism’ in Benjamin Goold and Liora Lazarus, eds., Security and Human Rights, 2nd edn., (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2019), 211-232.  
  • ‘Transnational Non-State Regulation and Domestic Administrative Law' in Susan Rose-Ackerman et al., Comparative Administrative Law, second edition (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2017), 582-97.
  • ‘The Elusive Quest for Precision in a Messy Pluralist Reality’ [review essay] (2017) 8 Transnational Legal Theory 1-8.
  • ‘Prospects for Judicial Review of Transnational Private Regulation: Singapore and Canada’ (2016) 21 Tilburg Law Review 230-54​
  • ‘Constitutional Interpretation in an Age of Glob​alization: Challenges and Prospects’ in Jaclyn L. Neo, ed., Constitutional Interpretation in Singapore: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 341-62.
Prof. Ramraj is interested in supervising both LLM and PhD students in the areas of comparative constitutional law, especially on Asia; transnational law and regulation; legal pluralism; emergency powers; and law and complexity.