Distinguished friends

When people think about migration in an abstract, decontextualised way it can appear frightening – even threatening. But when we come to see migrants as people who share our hopes and aspirations, fear recedes and appreciation can grow. The Migration Museum is poised to make a major contribution to this project of contesting false assumptions and opening our collective eyes to the real gifts that migrants bring to their new communities.

Professor James Hathaway

Professor Hathaway, the James E and Sarah A Degan Professor of Law and Director of the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law at the University of Michigan since 1998, is a leading authority on international refugee law whose work is regularly cited by the most senior courts of the common law world. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Refugee Law at the University of Amsterdam, Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne, Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme, and President of the Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law.

From 2008 until 2010 he 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 (1984–98), Counsel on Special Legal Assistance for the Disadvantaged to the Government of Canada (1983–4), and Professeur adjoint de droit at the Université de Moncton, Canada (1980–3). He has been appointed a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo, and at the Universities of California, Macerata, Tokyo, and Toronto.

Professor Hathaway’s publications include more than seventy journal articles, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991, republished in both Japanese and Russian), an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconceiving International Refugee Law, 1997) and, most recently, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005) – the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention.

He is Emeritus Counsel on International Protection to the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and Founding Patron and Honorary Director of Asylum Access, a non-profit organisation committed to delivering innovative legal aid to refugees in the global South. He also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Immigration and Nationality Law Reports and directs the Refugee Caselaw Site (www.refugeecaselaw.org), a website that collects, indexes, and publishes leading judgments on refugee law. He regularly advises and provides training on refugee law to academic, non-governmental, and official audiences around the world.