Priscylla Joca

Areas of Expertise

• International Indigenous Rights
• Indigenous and Aboriginal Law
• Legal Pluralism, Indigenous Legal Orders
• International
• Human Rights Law
• Environmental Law
• Ecological Justice, Environmental Justice, and Environmental Racism

Priscylla Joca is a Brazilian-Canadian legal scholar working across human rights, ecological and environmental justice, legal pluralism, Indigenous legal orders, international Indigenous rights, and Indigenous and Aboriginal law.

Her work draws on international, comparative, feminist, and decolonial perspectives, and is shaped by long-standing collaborative engagement with Indigenous peoples, organizations, and scholars in both countries. Her current research, funded by SSHRC Explore and TMU, focuses on water, equity, law and governance.

Before joining Lincoln Alexander School of Law, Priscylla held an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Professor John Borrows, working on Indigenous law and environmental governance in Canada and Latin America.

She holds an LL.D. from the Université de Montréal (2023), where her doctoral research examined free, prior, and informed consent and Indigenous self-determination. Her LL.M. in Constitutional Law from the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil (2011) focused on the strategies through which Indigenous peoples and local traditional communities assert collective rights to lands, territories, and resources.

The thread running through all of it is self-determination, not as an abstraction, but as living law.