Idriss Fofana

Idriss Fofana is Assistant Professor of Law and Affiliate Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. He writes and teaches in the areas of international law, comparative law, legal history, and law and colonialism.

His research traces the history of international law and other forms of inter-polity order in Africa and Asia from the seventeenth century onward, with a particular focus on African and Asian engagement with transnational legal regimes. His work addresses issues ranging from the international protection of private property and the relationship between territory and decolonization to the law of treaties and international labor migration. He conducts research primarily in Chinese (classical and modern), French, Arabic (classical), and Portuguese.

Professor Fofana is currently working on a series of articles that explore the role of history in the theory and practice of international law, notably through the implications of the principle of intertemporal law for title to territory, the law of treaties, and claims to reparation for historical wrongs. He is especially interested in how international law takes into account the historical practice of non-Western peoples and polities. He is also working on a book manuscript on the regulation of Chinese and West African international labor migration between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d’histoire du droit international, and other publications. He is also the co-editor, alongside Rabiat Akande, of International Legal Histories of Precolonial Africa, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Before joining the faculty, he was the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School. He also served as a Judicial Fellow for Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf, then president of the International Court of Justice.

Originally from Côte d’Ivoire, Professor Fofana received an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. He has also been a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University, Jinan University (Guangzhou), Fudan University Law School, and Paris 1 University Panthéon-Sorbonne.