Dr. Dominic Dagbanja

Associate Professor Dagbanja joined the Curtin University in July 2024 from The University of Western Australia Law School where he served as Senior Lecturer in Law, Director of the Business Law Major and Unit Coordinator of Postgraduate Dissertation Units. He is a Research Fellow of the African Procurement Law Unit, Department of Mercantile Law, Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Fellow of Higher Education Academy, United Kingdom; Technical Consultant at Growth Perspective Ltd, Jamaica; and Guest Lecturer at University of Ghana School of Law where he has given lectures to postgraduate students on Investment Treaty Arbitration. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Manchester School of Law in the United Kingdom. Associate Professor Dagbanja also served as a Lecturer in Law at Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration in Accra, Ghana, and Graduate Teaching Assistant at The University of Auckland Law School in New Zealand. His first teaching appointment was at the University of Ghana where he did his National Service as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Sociology.

Associate Professor Dagbanja’s article, The Intersection of Public Procurement Law and Policy and International Investment Law, won the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development-Society of International Economic Law Award for Research on Investment and Development. He served as International Investment Agreements/Investment Policy Consultant to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He made presentations and had academic engagements at various international academic conferences and served as Guest Speaker at the invitations of Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Afronomicslaw Academic Forum and Growth Perspective Ltd.

Associate Professor Dagbanja’s specific research interest is in the consequences of treaty-based investment and trade agreements for public interest regulatory autonomy and the role of national constitutions and general international law in the making, interpretation, and enforcement of these treaties. More specifically, Associate Professor Dagbanja’s research explores the intersection of international economic treaties and public law and policy, for example the intersection of investment treaties and the exercise of states’ regulatory authority in the areas of human rights, environmental protection and the development policymaking and implementation. He seeks to theorise about the limitations that the right of states to regulate in the public interest places or ought to place on the competence of states to conclude trade and investment treaties. He has published extensively on this theme in leading peer-review international law journals and yearbooks including Transnational Legal Theory, Journal of International Economic Law, Journal of World Investment and Trade, Cambridge Law Review, Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal and German Yearbook of International Law. The Imperatives Theory, developed in his monograph The Investment Treaty Regime and Public Interest Regulation in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) addresses the question of how constitutional law (municipal law) and general international law, which are conventionally treated as antinomic in investor-state arbitration and theories of the relationship between municipal law and international law, simultaneously preserve states’ right to regulate in the public interest and limit the competence of African states in the making of international economic rules governing trade and investment.

Prior to joining academia, Associate Professor Dagbanja practised law as: a Pupil, and later as a Junior Associate, at Bentsil-Enchill, Letsa & Ankomah; Assistant State Attorney at the Ministry of Justice & Attorney-General’s Department of Ghana and Senior Legal Officer at the Public Procurement Authority of Ghana. He was a Legal Assistant in the law firm of Gustavo Matheus, Esq. LLC in Maryland, Research Assistant at American Bar Association Section of Public Contract Law and Senior Intern at International Law Institute in Washington DC.