of Victoria
BA (Honours) – Panjab University, LLB – Panjab University, LLM – UBC, PhD – UBC
Legal pluralism, legal ethics, int’l human rights law, legal history, law and colonialism.
Dr. Pooja Parmar is an Associate Professor at UVic Faculty of Law. Her current research focuses on the legal profession, its history, and ethical lawyering. She is currently involved in projects on legal professionals in Canada, India and Bhutan. One of these is a SSHRC-funded study of Indigenous laws as sources of ethical legal practice in BC. Much of Dr. Parmar’s research is informed by her interest in legal pluralism and questions of legal epistemology in multi-juridical spaces. In her published research Dr. Parmar has examined aspects of human right to water, Indigeneity, oral history and Indigenous claims, lawyers as translators across legal worlds, intersections of law and colonialism, and land, law and development. Her book titled Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, explores some of these issues in the context of Indigenous protests against a Coca-Cola facility. Her paper titled ‘Reconciliation and Ethical Lawyering: Some Thoughts on Cultural Competence’ on competence in the context of the TRC Calls to Action received the CALT Prize for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 2020.
Dr. Parmar joined the Faculty of Law in 2015. She received a PhD in Law from UBC, and has previously taught at Carleton University, Osgoode Hall Law School, and UBC Faculty of Law. At UVic Law Dr. Parmar teaches legal ethics and professionalism, property law, and international human rights law. She is currently supervising graduate research on legal history, law and colonialism, Indigenous rights and access to justice, environmental & social justice. Prior to commencing graduate research, she practiced law in New Delhi for several years.
Dr. Parmar is a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics (CALE), serves on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Law & Society, and is a founding member of the South Asia Global Forum at UVic.