James C. Hathaway is the Degan Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He works in the field of public international law, with a focus on international human rights law, international queer rights, and international refugee law. Prior to his retirement from the teaching faculty in 2022, Hathaway served as the founding Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan (1998-2022).

Hathaway earned law degrees from the Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto) (LL.B. Honours) and Columbia (LL.M., J.S.D.), and has received doctoral degrees honoris causa from the Université catholique de Louvain (2009) and University of Amsterdam (2017).

From 2008 until 2010 Hathaway was on leave from the University of Michigan to serve as the Dean of Law and William Hearn Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, where he established Australia’s first all-graduate legal education program. He previously held positions as Professor of Law and Associate Dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada (1984-1998), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983-1984), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980-1983). He has been appointed a visiting professor or scholar at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, San Francisco, Stanford, Tokyo, Toronto, and Torcuato di Tella, and was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam from 2010 to 2022.

Hathaway’s publications include more than one hundred journal articles, book chapters, and studies; a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, second edition 2014 with M. Foster; first edition 1991, republished in both Russian in 2007 and Japanese in 2008); an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997); and The Rights of Refugees under International Law (second edition 2021, first edition republished in Japanese in 2014 and Chinese 2017), the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention and the International Bill of Rights. He is the founding Editor of Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies. Hathaway regularly advises and provides training to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.