Sara Gwendolyn Ross

Dr. Sara Ross (BA (U Alberta), BA Hons (McGill), LL.B (McGill), B.C.L (McGill), LL.M. (Ottawa), Ph.D (Osgoode)) is an Associate Professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law where she teaches property law, private international law, critical perspectives on law, and cultural property and heritage law in a transnational context. She has held three prestigious postdoctoral fellowships (Banting, SSHRC, and Killam), in addition to previously teaching at other law schools such as both the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia (Transnational Law and Cultural Law) and the Osgoode Hall Law School. Dr. Ross completed her articles as a law clerk to the Honourable Justice Luc Martineau at the Federal Court and became a lawyer-member of the bar (Ontario) in 2013. She is the Associate Director of the Marine & Environmental Law Institute, the Director of the Marine & Environmental Law Program, and was the Acting Associate Dean of Research during the Fall of 2023.

Dr. Ross is an executive board member of the Association of Law Property and Society (Program Chair), Canadian Association of Law Teachers (Treasurer), and the co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Canadian Legal Education Annual Review. In 2021, she was named on of the "Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers" in Canada by Canadian Lawyer magazine, and was a recipient of the "Rising Stars: Leading Lawyers Under 40" award for Lexpert magazine's top Canadian lawyers under 40. In 2024 she was an Excellence Awardee in the category of Female Trailblazer of the Year at the Canadian Law Awards.

Her critical, comparative, and legal anthropology research has led to two dozen scholarly articles, book chapters, and books. She is also an active speaker on the international stage, presenting her work in multiple countries, and a human rights special national rapporteur. Her current research focuses on both law and the city as well as law and culture, using an urban legal anthropology methodology and engaging with knowledge mobilization in both the academic and local community. Her most recent book, Law and Intangible Cultural Heritage in the City, was published by Routledge in 2019—a Toronto music journalist called it a “must-read” and a six-page review in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal calling it “compelling … memorable for her implicit preservation of the sites’ intangible cultural heritages by way of ink on paper.”