Barnali Choudhury found her groove in international business law

Barnali Choudhury has the passport stamps to match her credentials as a globally renowned expert in international business law.

After completing her first legal degree in Canada, Choudhury earned an LLM at Columbia Law School in the U.S., followed by a PhD from Switzerland’s University of Zurich.

Her teaching career then took her to virtually every corner of the globe – starting in New Zealand, with stops in Germany, Singapore and the U.K., among others, before she finally returned home in 2021 to take up a role at Osgoode, where she shares duties as program director of the  Professional LLM in International Business Law.

“I absolutely adore the program and I’m proud to be a part of it,” Choudhury says, explaining that the International Business Law LLM was a perfect fit for her – not only because of the subject matter, but also because of its popularity with internationally trained lawyers, including many who are seeking to re-qualify in Canada via the National Committee on Accreditation process.

“I love that the students come from all over the world. They’re really enthusiastic and eager to learn and they bring so much flavour and colour to the classroom,” she adds.

Choudhury’s own journey to Osgoode began at the age of 13, when she first set her sights on the legal profession. Although there was no family history in the field, her success as a competitive public speaking champion attracted the attention of her school’s vice-principal.  

“We were practicing for a regional contest in his office and he suggested I would be very good as a lawyer,” says Choudhury, who has hardly looked back since.

Going into law school, Choudhury saw herself as a future criminal defence advocate or labour lawyer defending workers’ rights, but soon found her true calling after taking part in a first-year mooting program.

“It was focused on international law and I realized that this was where my future lay,” she says.  

Faced with Canada’s limited employment market in her chosen field, Choudhury launched her career in private practice at a large corporate law firm, before heading to the U.S. to pursue her LLM in international economic law and ultimately establishing herself as an international investment lawyer representing institutional investors in disputes with sovereign states at specialised arbitrations hosted by the World Bank in Washington D.C.

“I was working in the right area of law, but I wasn’t sure I was on the right side of disputes, representing businesses suing the governments of developing countries,” Choudhury said.

The watershed moment came when she acted for an American company chasing the government of Argentina over losses related to the country’s decision to de-peg its currency from the U.S. dollar.

“There was widespread poverty and social unrest. The whole country was in dire financial straits and I didn’t see how we could get any money out of them,” says Choudhury, explaining that she was then tasked with tracking down and confiscating a state-owned aircraft on behalf of her clients.

“I thought that maybe this was not the right job for me,” she adds.

Soon after, Choudhury made the switch to academia, where she began to represent state entities as part of her work exploring business and international economic issues, with a focus on their intersection with human rights.

At Osgoode, Choudhury has already put her own stamp on the International Business Law LLM, drawing on the full depth of her experience to teach courses such as Comparative Corporate Governance and Multinational Enterprises and the Law.  

She says students will see the influence of her recent work on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in an additional class on Corporate Social Responsibility, which looks at how companies are held to account for their records on a wide variety of issues, including climate change, human rights, labour standards and business ethics.

“The discussion goes beyond economic impacts, to cover the social impacts that are increasingly recognized in the community as important to address,” Choudhury says. “The focus is a little more global than with JD students and the idea is that we talk about events not only in Canada, but also what is happening with Canadian companies when they are operating abroad.”

She has also embraced OsgoodePD’s focus on interactive and interdisciplinary learning, through a unique mix of academic, applied, and theoretical perspectives. “I’m not standing up and lecturing to the room. I pose questions that the students can engage with and we get a dialogue going back and forth,” Choudhury says. “The idea is that they are active participants in their own learning process.”