xvi Notes on Contributors
Salish territory on the southwest coast of British Columbia, Canada where she is
an avid practitioner of Aikido, the martial art of peace.
Christine Frison carried out legal studies in France and England and obtained a
master’s degree in public international law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She specializes in international environmental law and worked as a consultant for international institutions (UN-related) and national governments. She
also worked as a legal research fellow at the Center for International Sustainable
Development Law (CISDL), Montreal (Canada, based at McGill University). She
defended her joint-PhD entitled Towards Redesigning a Global Seed Commons both
at UC Louvain and at KU Leuven (Belgium, under the co-supervision of professors Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Olivier De Schutter and Geertrui Van Overwalle),
which took interest in the intellectual property rights and collective action implications of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture, using the Commons as a theoretical framework.
Christine currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Belgian Research
Foundation (FNRS, 2020–2023) and is an associate researcher at the “Government & Law Research Group” of the University of Antwerp Law Faculty. She
has taught the course “International and European Environmental Law” at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles, and part of the “Advanced course on International
Sustainable Development Law” at the University of Antwerp. She also supervises
master and PhD students in four Belgian universities.
She has published several books, including a monograph published by
Routledge:
Redesigning the Global Seed Commons. Law and Policy for Agrobiodiversity and Food
Security, 1
st Edition 2019.
Her latest publication “Bringing access and benefit-sharing into the digital
age”, Plant People, Planet, 2021, makes policy proposals to untie the Gordian knot
around digital sequence information in the access and benefit-sharing international regime.
Fabien Girard is an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Faculty of Law, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) in France, where he teaches legal philosophy, agrobiodiversity and the law, and comparative law.
Between 2011 and 2013, he was appointed as a Project Manager to the Haut
Conseil des Biotechnologies in Paris (France), where he worked on industrial
property, plant biotechnology and farmers’ seed networks.
While on secondment at the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO – Oxford, UK)
from 2014 to 2016, he conducted a research program called “Theory of Law and
Legal Anthropology”. As part of that responsibility, he organized several conferences and workshops on legal and political philosophy, as well as on the international governance of biodiversity. He has written extensively on the connections
between biotechnology, plant innovation and industrial property, as well as on
formal and informal seed systems and crop genetic diversity.
Salish territory on the southwest coast of British Columbia, Canada where she is
an avid practitioner of Aikido, the martial art of peace.
Christine Frison carried out legal studies in France and England and obtained a
master’s degree in public international law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She specializes in international environmental law and worked as a consultant for international institutions (UN-related) and national governments. She
also worked as a legal research fellow at the Center for International Sustainable
Development Law (CISDL), Montreal (Canada, based at McGill University). She
defended her joint-PhD entitled Towards Redesigning a Global Seed Commons both
at UC Louvain and at KU Leuven (Belgium, under the co-supervision of professors Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Olivier De Schutter and Geertrui Van Overwalle),
which took interest in the intellectual property rights and collective action implications of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture, using the Commons as a theoretical framework.
Christine currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Belgian Research
Foundation (FNRS, 2020–2023) and is an associate researcher at the “Government & Law Research Group” of the University of Antwerp Law Faculty. She
has taught the course “International and European Environmental Law” at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles, and part of the “Advanced course on International
Sustainable Development Law” at the University of Antwerp. She also supervises
master and PhD students in four Belgian universities.
She has published several books, including a monograph published by
Routledge:
Redesigning the Global Seed Commons. Law and Policy for Agrobiodiversity and Food
Security, 1
st Edition 2019.
Her latest publication “Bringing access and benefit-sharing into the digital
age”, Plant People, Planet, 2021, makes policy proposals to untie the Gordian knot
around digital sequence information in the access and benefit-sharing international regime.
Fabien Girard is an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Faculty of Law, Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) in France, where he teaches legal philosophy, agrobiodiversity and the law, and comparative law.
Between 2011 and 2013, he was appointed as a Project Manager to the Haut
Conseil des Biotechnologies in Paris (France), where he worked on industrial
property, plant biotechnology and farmers’ seed networks.
While on secondment at the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO – Oxford, UK)
from 2014 to 2016, he conducted a research program called “Theory of Law and
Legal Anthropology”. As part of that responsibility, he organized several conferences and workshops on legal and political philosophy, as well as on the international governance of biodiversity. He has written extensively on the connections
between biotechnology, plant innovation and industrial property, as well as on
formal and informal seed systems and crop genetic diversity.