James Hathaway (born 1956) is a Canadian-American scholar of international refugee law and related aspects of human rights and public international law. His work has been frequently cited by the most senior courts of the common law world, and has played a pivotal role in the evolution of refugee studies scholarship. Hathaway pioneered the understanding of refugee status as surrogate or substitute protection of human rights,[1] authored the world's first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees, merging doctrinal study of refugee and human rights law with empirical analysis of the state of refugee protection around the world[2] and directed a groundbreaking multidisciplinary and global team of scholars and officials in an initiative to reconceive the structures of refugee protection more fairly to share burdens and responsibilities.[3] Hathaway also convened the Michigan Colloquium on Challenges in International Refugee Law, which met eight times between 1999 and 2017 to formulate guidelines[4] to resolve cutting-edge concerns on both refugee status and refugee rights under international law. An archive of Hathaway's scholarly working papers has been established at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library.[5]
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Hathaway is the Founding Editor of Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies, and served as Senior Advisor to Asylum Access, a non-profit organization committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the Global South (2013-2022) and Counsel on International Protection to the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (2008-2022).
Hathaway is the Degan Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Michigan Law School (USA) where he served as the founding Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law (1998-2022).
He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, San Francisco, Stanford, Tokyo, and Toronto. Hathaway was also the Distinguished Visiting professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam from 2010 to 2022.
Prior to joining the Michigan faculty, Hathaway served as founding faculty member of the Ecole de droit de l'Université de Moncton (Canada)(1981-1984), the world's first French-language common law program of study, and Professor of Law and Associate Dean of York University's Osgoode Hall Law School (1984-1998).
From 2008 until 2010, Hathaway was on leave from Michigan Law School to serve as the Dean and William Hearn Chair of Law at the Melbourne Law School in Australia.[7] At Melbourne he led the Law School's transition to become Australia's first, all-graduate (JD) program.[8] Hathaway's main focus was to establish Melbourne as Australia's leading law school, including by joining other law schools from around the world to establish the London-based Centre for Transnational Legal Studies, and launching joint degree programs linking Melbourne with leading law schools on three continents, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong (JD/LLM), New York University (JD/JD and JD/LLM) and Oxford University (JD/BCL).
Hathaway's scholarly work focuses on international human rights and refugees.
Among his publications are a treatise on the refugee definition, The Law of Refugee Status: 2nd Edition (with M. Foster) (2014);[9] and an analysis of the nature of the legal duty to protect refugees, The Rights of Refugees under International Law: 2nd Edition (2021);[10] and an interdisciplinary study of refugee law reform, Reconceiving International Refugee Law (1997).[11] He has also published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters, and commentaries on refugee law and related questions.
