Legal theory scholar Sina Akbari joins Faculty of Law

The newest faculty member at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law says there are three aims of a good legal education and the third one, understanding legal theory, is of equal importance to the others.

“One of the aims is to understand what legal rules, practices and institutions we have,” says Assistant Professor Sina Akbari, who joined the Faculty in January. “Another is to understand the lawyer’s role in those institutions and practices — whose interests lawyers represent and how lawyers make their arguments.”

“But an important third element is thinking about what makes our laws good laws and how we should change them to make them better. Because law involves the use of state power, it must be justified in some way.”

As a scholar of legal theory, his research is focused on the way considerations of distributive justice (how benefits and burdens are allocated in society) bear on private law (disputes between individuals). Because legal institutions like taxation are layered on top of private law concepts of property and contract, our understanding of private law affects how we think of tax law.

For example, he says, when people think of taxation as an appropriation of something that morally belongs to them, that reflects a particular understanding of how private law is justified. That thinking, in turn, “has an effect on the extent to which people believe that other institutions are infringing on their rights, rather than looking at them all as tools for promoting social aims.”

His interest in this area began while he was practising as a lawyer at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP about a decade ago. There he began thinking of the role of the tax system and how it relates to other areas of law.

Later on, working as a tax litigator at the Department of Justice, he grew to appreciate the practical effects of law on people’s lives. “The thing that opened my eyes was the way in which individuals interact with the law and the legal system, how they navigate it and how challenging it can be,” says Akbari.

Background

Akbari is a native of Calgary who has a B.Comm from the University of Calgary. He earned his JD from the University of Toronto, his LLM from New York University and is in the final year of his PhD at the London School of Economics.

In addition to practising law in Toronto and New York City for Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, and as a litigator at the Department of Justice, he worked on policy development for the Ontario Securities Commission.

This term, he is teaching a Jurisprudence course titled Tax, Justice & Society, a course in which upper-year students examine how we argue about and evaluate taxes as just and fair as well as discrete issues concerning universal basic income, the politics of taxation and how tax law reflects ideas of gender and race.

“So far, I’ve been really impressed by how engaged students are given the challenges of online learning,” Akbari says.

It’s certainly a circumstance that he shares, since his PhD supervisors are in the UK.

“I can sympathize. I do think it’s really challenging. I can understand how tough it can be for students.”