Amy Swiffen, PhD

Education

Research interests

Dr. Amy Swiffen’s research examines the relationship between law, power, and society, with particular attention to constitutional and Aboriginal law, socio-legal theory, and the operation of law in settler colonial contexts. Her publications address the legal dimensions of social and political life, including the framing of hate crimes, the biopolitics of HIV criminalisation, and the role of law in colonial governance. Building on this work, she extends socio-legal theory through engagements with Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. In this research, she critiques the contemporary use of Benjamin’s concept of divine violence and develops his analysis of law and violence to examine the constitutive violence of colonial legality. She also reinterprets Foucault’s framework of biopolitics to address the settler colonial contexts of Canada, highlighting the role of law in mediating the relationship between sovereignty, territory, and population. Her current research continues this line of inquiry through projects on legal pluralism and the juridical violence through which colonial legality was established. She is the co-editor of Indigenous Peoples and the Future of Federalism (University of Toronto Press, 2024), which develops jurisprudence on the possibilities for a nation-to-nation relationship between Indigenous nations and Crown sovereignty, and she leads a SSHRC-funded project on the 1927–1951 amendments to Canada’s Indian Act that prohibited Indigenous peoples from retaining legal counsel, examining how this provision functioned through administrative rather than judicial processes. Her work has been supported through visiting professorships and major research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de recherche du Québec. She serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Journal of Law and Society and has held other editorial and leadership roles, including Department Chair and Graduate Program Director.