Rate My Professor Pooja Parmar

Pooja Parmar is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria, holding the President’s Chair in Law and Indigeneity in a Global Context. She obtained her BA (Honours) from Panjab University in 1993, LLB from Panjab University in 1996, LLM from the University of British Columbia in 2006, and PhD in Law from UBC in 2013. Before joining UVic Faculty of Law in 2015, she practiced law in New Delhi for several years and taught at Carleton University Department of Law and Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law School, and UBC Faculty of Law. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives (2023-2026) and Vice President of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics.

Professor Parmar’s research specializations include Indigeneity, the legal profession, ethical lawyering, legal pluralism, legal history, and legal epistemology in multi-juridical spaces. Her ongoing projects encompass a SSHRC-funded study of Indigenous laws as sources of ethical legal practice in British Columbia and a Global Affairs Canada-funded collaborative initiative on Indigenous laws and transpacific trade. She leads the Indigeneity in Asia project. Key publications feature her book Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings (Cambridge University Press, 2015), the chapter ‘The Lawyer-Client relationship’ (co-authored with Richard Devlin) in Lawyers’ Ethics and Professional Regulation, 4th Edition (LexisNexis, 2021), and the article ‘Reconciliation and Ethical Lawyering: Some Thoughts on Cultural Competence’ (Canadian Bar Review, 2019), which earned the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Prize for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in 2020. Other notable works include ‘A Mixed Bag: Critical Reflections on the Revised Ethical Principles for Judges’ (Canadian Bar Review, 2022) and ‘Undoing Historical Wrongs: Law and Indigeneity in India’ (Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 2012). Her awards include the President’s Chair (2023), UVic Law Students’ Society First Year Class Teaching Award (2017), UBC Faculty of Law PhD Dissertation Prize (2012-2013), and Osgoode Society Legal History Prize (2008). She serves on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Law & Society and the CAPI Steering Committee, teaches legal ethics and professionalism, property law, international human rights law, and supervises graduate research on Indigeneity, legal ethics, and related topics.