Julie Ada is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section) at the University of Ottawa. She previously served as the Allan Rock Visiting Professor (2023-2024) and was a Shirley Greenberg Fellow in Women and the Legal Profession (2021-2023). She is the Global Research Lead on Gender-Based Violence & Racialized Governance with the Office of the UNESCO Chair in Health, Race and Human Rights. She teaches and has taught courses in Property Law, Immigration and Refugee Law, Theory and Practice of Social Justice, Race, Gender and Canadian Legal Culture, Comparative Law, Applied Learning, and Equal Justice Advocacy.
Professor Ada’s research lies at the intersection of public international law, feminist legal theory, decolonial thought, and international human rights law. Her scholarship examines how global legal institutions construct and regulate concepts such as vulnerability, responsibility, and justice, while interrogating the colonial and racialized assumptions that shape international legal knowledge. Drawing on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, she develops decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding human rights governance, legal pluralism, and the relationship between international and local normative orders.
Her research addresses a broad range of issues, including violence against women, racialized governance, epistemic injustice, gender-based violence, structural inequality, legal pluralism, and the regulation of culture and religion. Across these areas, her work explores how law simultaneously operates as a site of protection and a mechanism through which hierarchies of knowledge and power are reproduced.
Her publications have examined violence against women, international human rights law, legal pluralism, harmful traditional practices, the criminal and moral responsibility of women who abuse children, and the feminization of culture and religion. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Human Rights, Human Rights Law Review,Journal of Human Rights Practice, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, The International Journal of Human Rights, International Journal of Law in Context, Global Journal of Comparative Law and other leading journals.
Professor Ada holds an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from the University of Cape Town, an LL.M. in Comparative Law from McGill University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa. She is a member of the Law Society of Ontario and continues to practise in the areas of family and immigration law. Her current research advances decolonial approaches to international law across four intersecting areas: rethinking the regulation of gender-based violence through decentered networked governance; examining climate adaptation, care labour, and feminized resilience; critiquing the use of quantitative indicators in United Nations human rights treaty monitoring; and developing decolonial methodologies for teaching international law beyond curricular inclusion.