Alan Hanna

Biography

I was appointed to the Faculty of Law in 2019 as an assistant professor. My teaching and research interests include Indigenous laws and jurisdiction, governance, rights and title, and environmental sustainability under Indigenous legal traditions, Aboriginal law and jurisprudence, and the many intersections of these disparate systems. My primary research interest is how agreements and resulting obligations arise in different Indigenous legal orders, as a means of thinking about alternate conceptions of contracting with others. I teach Transsystemic Contracts in the JD/JID program, where students explore various examples of agreements, promises, and obligations from diverse Indigenous legal perspectives in conversation with contract law concepts and principles. Additionally, I teach the Law 350I: Field Course in the JD/JID program, and Indigenous legal research methodologies. I have also taught Aboriginal Lands, Rights, and Governance.

I previously practiced Aboriginal law at Woodward & Company Lawyers LLP in Victoria. A person of mixed Blackfoot, French, and Scottish ancestry, I am connected to the Northern Secwepemc community of T’exelc through marriage. My PhD work involved analyses of Tsilhqot’in traditional laws applied to the access and use of surface water to provide a framework for informing contemporary Tsilhqot’in watershed governance.