Ayodeji Kamau Perrin

Biography

Dr. Ayodeji Kamau Perrin, J.D., Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary scholar of human rights, social movements, and legal mobilization. He is interested in all phases of litigation-based social change processes, including the factors that lead aggrieved individuals and groups to select a litigation-based strategy; the internal dynamics of a social change movement or campaign; countermobilization; the decision-making of judges; judgment compliance and non-compliance; and backlash. He is especially interested in the transnational dynamics of these processes, including the emergence of transnational litigation networks; comparative constitutional interpretation and transnational judicial dialogue; norm diffusion and norm internalization; and norm contestation and norm polarization. His research thus engages scholars of constitutional law (particularly civil rights and liberties), international law and international relations theory (particularly norm diffusion and transnational legal process), social movement theory, and legal mobilization theory.

Dr. Perrin’s published work has appeared in Boston University Law Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law. For example, his article, The Evolution of Sodomy Decriminalization Jurisprudence in Transnational and Comparative Constitutional Perspective, chronicles the shift from the privacy-based framework that dominated decriminalization jurisprudence in the Global North in the 1970s through 1990s to a framework based on human dignity and freedom of expression that emerges from and that dominates Global South decriminalization jurisprudence in the twenty-first century. A related work, Decriminalization Matters: LGBTQ Transnational Litigation Networks and Movement Lawyering in the Global South, engages two important critiques of transnational human rights advocacy – one regarding the human rights regime as a form of neocolonialism and imperialism, the second regarding the marginalization of already marginalized individuals and groups by legal elites. And his article, Ogoni Activism and Access to Remedy: Business and Human Rights from the Bottom Up, provides a comprehensive overview of nearly three decades worth of litigation against Royal Dutch/Shell by residents and exiled members of Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The article thus reinscribes aggrieved individuals and groups as powerful agents and not just as passive victims.

Dr. Perrin holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in political science. He received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he received B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from Tufts University and Columbia University, respectively. Before joining the BU Law faculty, Dr. Perrin was a George Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he taught courses on race and the law and business and human rights. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct faculty member at Temple University in the Department of Political Science, where he taught courses on the role of race in international politics, LGBTQ politics and legal mobilization, and international human rights law. He has also served as a staff attorney with the City of Philadelphia Board of Ethics and as a judicial law clerk in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.