Ada Ordor

Ada Ordor is the Steiner Visiting Professor in Human Rights for the Spring term 2024. During her time at Harvard Law School, Professor Ordor will convene the courses Regional Integration and Human Rights in Africa as well as The Legal Environment for Business in Africa.

A law professor and director of the Centre for Comparative Law in Africa (CCLA) at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town (UCT), Professor Ordor’s work explores issues of law and development from various perspectives that demonstrate the interconnectedness of development processes and the laws that govern them. Understanding how the law can support or work against alternative, complementary and supplemental development pathways significantly contributes to the shaping and reshaping of legal frameworks and processes for a more expansive realisation of a spectrum of human rights. Having worked in various sectors since 1990, including legal practice, civil society and academia, she has engaged with the intersections of the law with the development continuum and now supervises graduate research around these intersections.

Professor Ordor has held academic positions at the Nigerian Law School from 2001 to 2007 and visiting research positions at the African Gender Institute, UCT in 2000 as a visiting associate and at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies, Center for Civil Society Studies, Baltimore in 2003 as a senior international philanthropy fellow. She is an international fellowship alumna of the American Association of University Women and editor of the Journal of Comparative Law in Africa.

At UCT, Professor Ordor convenes the LLM programme in Comparative Business Law in Africa, which is comprised of the core courses, Law, Regional Integration and Development in Africa and Comparative Law and Business in Africa. Her comprehensive list of publications are accessible at her UCT webpage while her representative publications are listed below.