Lawyer Profile

Biography

Sadeq Bigdeli is a Barrister & Solicitor in Ontario, Canada. His firm (Bigdeli Law) is active in the area of immigration and corporate/commercial and trade law. Sadeq has held full-time academic positions in New Zealand (Senior Lecturere 2010-2017) and Iran (SBU National Law School 2016-2020). He has also taught in various universities from the Middle East to Switzerland, Canada, and the US. His main fields of expertise and scholarship include international trade and business law, immigration law, administrative law, and legal philosophy. He was a visiting scholar Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School’s Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security in 2022. While a law professor in New Zealand in 2014 and at the peak of negotiations over Iran’s Nuclear Deal, Dr. Bigdeli was invited by the Iran Trade Promotion Organization to help manage the process of the country’s reintegration into the world economy. During this time, Dr Bigdeli successfully negotiated various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), most notably Iran-Eurasian Economic Union FTA, including Russia. He also activated Iran’s membership quest to the World Trade Organization (WTO) after being stalled for a decade. He also drafted Iran’s first trade remedies (antidumping, countervailing and safeguards) regulations. Frustrated with the prospects of meaningful reforms in the ideologically-driven Iranian regime, Dr. Bigdeli resigned from his position as a trade negotiator at the same time when Donald Trump won the 2016 elections. He then took up a position at the SBU (National) University of Iran, which has the top law school in the country. He held his academic position at the SBU Law School until 2020 when he was notified by the university that his contract would no longer be extended for “administrative reasons”. He, however, attributes his dismissal to the critical views he always shared with his students, which was very often critical towards the Iranian clerical regime and the IRGC as well as the fact that he had refused to take part in any “ideology workshops” mandated for professors as a prerequisite for extending their contracts. Dr. Bigdeli holds an MA and a Ph.D. in law from the University of Bern, and an LLM (’09) from Harvard Law School. He has co-edited two volumes with Cambridge University Press (2009) and Edward Elgar (2017) and published numerous articles and book chapters in the last decade. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Georgetown Law School in 2011 and a lecturer at Harvard Institute for Global Law & Policy in Doha in 2014.