Dr. Bita Amani

Bita joined Spark Law with the goal of finding new inspiration from practicing with a great group of like-minded, Spark-ly spirited, people all lit up with life and law, while expanding the team’s practice area of service for clients into intellectual property law.

Bita considers herself to be an alchemist and is always looking for new ways to engage the law in the service of alchemy. She has long held an interest in the creative arts, writing, theater and the imaginary, mostly for exploring how these fields capture the human experience. She soon realized that law is another way of examining the human experience and was motivated to interrogate how legal norms imagine lived possibilities.

Bita is a tenured law professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where she has been teaching since 2002 and is Co-Director of Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s (since inception). Bita loves the law and new learning opportunities and is ready to take on your legal challenges and opportunities with the same enthusiasm.

She fell in love with the law in high school while doing a co-op placement at a local small law firm in North York. She went on to pursue an undergraduate degree in Sociology from York University (BA, with distinction), an LLB from Osgoode Hall Law School, and skipped over the Masters Degree to earn an SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) from the University of Toronto, where she was a doctoral fellow of the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (she got to skip the Masters in law).

Bita’s first publications were prize-winning papers in the fields of Trademarks and Copyright (she was writing on geographic indications and the “Philosopher’s Stone” (in 2000), before it became a Harry Potter thing (did we mention she is prescient as well?).

Bita has enjoyed opportunities to engage with diverse people and unique legal issues in complicated contexts, an interest that was first sparked (get it?) by her work at Parkdale Community Legal Clinic as a law student, then developed by working as a summer student for the Ministry of Labour researching and writing a report on delegated administrative organizations, and finally refined by an articling position with a defence insurance law firm in downtown Toronto. Her particular affinity for intellectual property law, however, ultimately brought her back to education and academia.