Professor Diab began graduate studies in law at the Allard School of Law at UBC in 2006 and returned for the PhD in law in 2009.
After completing his LLM, and with encouragement from Professors Wesley Pue, Robin Elliot and others at Allard Law, Professor Diab developed his thesis into a book titled “Guantanamo North: Terrorism and the Administration of Justice in Canada” (Fernwood, 2008). Working with Professor Pue again for the PhD, Professor Diab chose to expand the scope of his research to include developments in national security in the United States as well as Canada.
Over the course of his doctoral studies at Allard Law, Professor Diab received the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and attended the Yale Law School as a visiting scholar. He completed his PhD in 2013, receiving the Dean of Law PhD prize, and joined the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University (TRU), where he is now an Associate Professor.
In 2015, he published “The Harbinger Theory: How the Post-9/11 Emergency Became Permanent and the Case for Reform” (Oxford University Press). The book argues that for much of the period after 9/11, North American debates about rights and security have largely been shaped by the belief that 9/11 marked a new order of terror, with further attacks likely on a similar or greater scale, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction. The book advances a critical assessment of this theory as an argument against the need to further entrench extraordinary measures and other forms of authoritarian legality.
Professor Diab has since published work tracing ways in which the harbinger theory continues to shape contemporary law and politics, and has also published work in the areas of police powers, sentencing, and human rights. Together with Professors Neudorf and Hunt at TRU, Professor Diab is also a founder and co-editor in chief of the Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law.
Professor Diab enjoys teaching criminal law and jurisprudence at TRU, and continues to research in areas of national security, criminal law, legal theory, and human rights. For more information on Professor Diab, please visit his academic webpage.
