Dr Roxana Banu

Roxana Banu is a fellow and associate professor in law at Lady Margaret Hall and the Faculty of Law. Prior to joining Oxford University, she was a lecturer in private international law at Queen Mary University Faculty of Law and an Assistant Professor of Law at Western Law School in Canada.

Roxana read law at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she was awarded the DAAD Prize for outstanding results of a foreign student. She obtained her LL.M. magna cum laudae from Fordham Law School in New York, where she received the Edward J. and Elizabeth V. Hawk award for outstanding results. Her doctorate degree is from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Alan Marks Medal for the best graduate thesis and the Strauss Fellowship in International Law.

Roxana’s interests lie in private and public international law, legal history, and feminist theory. In legal history, she published on the nineteenth century intellectual history of private international law and on the history of private international law during the time of the League of Nations. She is currently working on a project on the history of private international law in the colonial context and on a social history of interwar cross-border family maintenance conventions.

Her work in legal theory focused on mid 20th-century theories of justice in private international law and on connecting moral contractualism to those theories of justice. She is the co-editor of the first volume on Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law, forthcoming with OUP in the series “Philosophical Foundations of Law.”

In feminist history and theory Roxana wrote on relational feminist perspectives on private international law, for which she received the 2016 ASIL Private International Law Interest Group Award. She also unearthed the role of female social workers in the history of private international law. She is currently working on an account of the pervasiveness of questions of gender in the theoretical and methodological development of private international law. 

• Private and public international law 
• Legal history 
• Feminist theory

Roxana teaches the following:

• Conflict of Laws 
• Land Law 
• Torts

Books

Nineteenth Century Perspectives on Private International Law (OUP, 2018).

Philosophical Foundations of Conflict of Laws (coedited with Ralf Michaels and Michael Green; forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024 in the series “Philosophical Foundations of Law”).

Articles

Teaching by Historicizing Private International Law, 18 International Journal of Law in Context 383 (2022) .

The Pragmatic Idealism of Josephus Jitta (1854-1925) 1 Revue Critique de Droit International Privé 2020, p. 5-29 (available in English and French).

Conflicting Justice in Conflict of Laws, 53 VAND. J. TRANSNAT’L L. 461-523 (2020).

From the Law of Nations to the Private Law of Mankind, 51 CORNELL INT’L L. J. ONLINE 101-111 (2018).

A Relational Feminist Approach to Conflict of Laws, 24 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 1-52 (2017).

Assuming Regulatory Authority for Transnational Torts: An Interstate Affair? A Historical Perspective on the Canadian Private International Law Tort Rules, 31 WINDSOR YB ACCESS JUST 197-211 (2013).
Cited by the Supreme Court of Canada in Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya, 2020 SCC 5.

Book Chapters

Reading A. V. Dicey’s Private International Law in the Penumbra: Race and Gender (forthcoming in a collection edited by Andrew Dickinson, Timothy Endicott, and Wolfgang Ernst, to be published with Intersentia in 2024). 

A Period of Reckoning: Private International Law During the Time of the League of Nations (forthcoming in Robert Kolb (ed.) The Cambridge History of International Law. Vol. 10 - The League of Nations., 2024.

A Conceptual History of “Comity” (Jan Smits et. al (eds.), Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, 2023).

Introduction (forthcoming in Roxana Banu, Michael Green and Ralf Michaels eds., Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law, 2023).

What We Owe to Each Other in Private International Law - Moral Contractualism and Transnational Justice (forthcoming in Roxana Banu, Michael Green and Ralf Michaels eds., Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law, 2024).

Forgotten Female Figures in the History of Private International Law: The International Social Service, 1920-1970 (Immi Tallgren ed., Unknown Names and Faces? Broadening the Portrait Gallery of International Law, OUP, 2023).