Dr Malcolm Rogge

Dr Malcolm Rogge, SJD (Harvard Law School), MES (York), JD (Osgoode Hall), Graduate Dipl. CERLAC (York), BA (Hons) First Class (Manitoba), Barrister and Solicitor of the Bar of Ontario, Canada.

Dr Malcolm Rogge is a prominent Business and Human Rights scholar-practitioner who integrates legal scholarship with aesthetically sophisticated visual advocacy. His thirty-year career is defined by impact-driven research-through-practice, exemplified by the internationally celebrated documentaries The Tribunal and Under Rich Earth; the latter of which was adopted as evidence in a seminal international investment arbitration case (Copper Mesa v. Republic Ecuador, PCA No. 2012-2). Rogge’s visual advocacy bridges legal academic debates and the lived experiences of Global South communities. He has extensive experience in the co-production of knowledge, collaborating with trust-based networks of human rights, environmental, agrarian, and Indigenous Peoples’ organisations in Latin America and Canada over three decades.

After splitting his time between legal professional work and filmmaking for over a decade, he returned to academia in 2012. He studied at Harvard University on a Fulbright Fellowship and now holds a Doctorate in Juridical Science (SJD) from Harvard Law School. His doctoral work was supervised by a multidisciplinary committee including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, former SEC General Counsel John Coates, and the architect of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, John G. Ruggie. Rogge’s scholarship appears in diverse venues, including Cambridge University Press, Routledge, the Fordham Journal on Corporate and Financial Law, the Texas International Law Journal, and the University of Exeter’s Global Tipping Points Report, 2025. In 2024, he joined Ecoforensic CIC as a Senior Advisor, translating research into practice by supporting rights of nature litigation in Ecuador through community-led citizen science initiatives and advocacy training. Dr Rogge collaborates with Ecoforensic C.I.C. in legal and communications training in three communities in Ecuador's Andean and low-mountain Amazon regions. 

From 2015 to 2019, Dr Rogge served as Teaching Fellow at Harvard University for postgraduate courses in Global Governance (with John G. Ruggie), Business & Human Rights (with John G. Ruggie), and Corporate Responsibility and New Governance Models (with Jane Nelson and John G. Ruggie). As a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School, Dr Rogge designed and led a research-based postgraduate workshop series in 2018 on Business & Human Rights: Bridging the Gap. He is a member of the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association and the Business and Human Rights Teaching Network. For six years, Dr Rogge served as Academic Delegate at the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights for the Harvard Human Rights Program. From 2016-2019, Dr Rogge taught Business & Human Rights at the Jindal Global University & Harvard School of Public Health Summer School on Human Rights and Development in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Documentary Filmmaking

In 2023, Dr Rogge produced and directed The Tribunal, a 28-minute documentary film about human rights and international investment law, in partnership with the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment at Columbia University, New York. The Tribunal premiered at Columbia Law School in October 2023 with remarks by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David R. Boyd. Filmed by in the megadiverse Ecuadorian cloud forest, The Tribunal brings to light the troubling human rights impacts on local nature defenders of the international investment arbitration system. Catherine Kessedijan, Professeur émérite de l’Université Panthéon-Assas, describes The Tribunal as "a tour de force, which shows all of the important points about investment law and human rights in only thirty minutes." Anil Yilmaz Vastardis and Tara Van Ho, Co-directors of the Essex Business and Human Rights Project write that: "The Tribunal is essential viewing for anyone working in the fields of international investment law and business and human rights, but most importantly for arbitrators and practitioners of investment law and arbitration."

Dr Rogge's media arts practice is largely devoted to impact-driven research-based documentary filmmaking. His international award-winning feature documentary film about a mining conflict in Ecuador, Under Rich Earth (2008), is regarded as a “classic example for companies on how not to handle community relations.” Under Rich Earth is held by over 50 University libraries worldwide and has been used in a wide range of law school and business school courses, including property law (University of Arizona), investment law (National University of Singapore), and Managing Responsibly (Toronto Metropolitan University). In 2016, Under Rich Earth was adopted as evidence and cited extensively by an international investment tribunal in the Copper Mesa Mining Corp. v Republic of Ecuador decision (P.C.A. 2012-2). Under Rich Earth was cited in National University of Singapore Professor Jean Ho’s treatise on “State Responsibility for Breaches of Investment Contracts” (2018 Cambridge University Press). His new research-based feature film, Flowers for the Idiot - Blumen für den Idioten, combines oral history with moving images of Berlin's contemporary landscape. It critically examines the collective memorialization of wartime atrocity. Based primarily on first person testimony that Dr Rogge collected over several years, the documentary is supported by extensive bibliographic and archival research about life in pre-war and WWII era Berlin. Rogge’s previous films have been supported by major awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council as well as the Toronto Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada.

Research Interests

Dr Malcolm Rogge’s research occupies the critical intersection of transnational corporate law and governance, international human rights, and environmental justice. He contributes to a highly specialised body of critical literature on the normative foundations of Business and Human Rights and the implementation challenges of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights. The scope of his research extends to planetary-scale environmental justice, as demonstrated by his work as a lead author of “A Human Rights Framework for Earth System Tipping Points Governance” in the University of Exeter’s Global Tipping Points Report 2025. Rogge uses visual media and narrative storytelling as an epistemic bridge, translating the human and ‘more-than-human’ impacts of global extractive industries into evidentiary records for international tribunals and national juridical fora. His methodology was validated when his film Under Rich Earth was adopted as evidence in the seminal and controversial international arbitration case Copper Mesa v. Ecuador (PCA 2012-2). More recently, in collaboration with Ecoforensic CIC, Rogge’s engaged research focuses on the co-production of knowledge for constitutional Rights of Nature litigation in Ecuador. This work supports Indigenous and agrarian communities by integrating citizen science with legal and communications strategies, with the objective of providing a replicable model for global Rights of Nature advocacy. 

Focus on Latin America: A Thirty-year Commitment to Engaged Research

Rogge's commitment to research-through-practice and engaged research is built upon a decade (1989-1998) of foundational, grant-funded undergraduate and graduate fieldwork in Latin America (Canadian International Development Agency, Canadian Lawyers Association for International Human Rights, Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean). This early career period involved extensive Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in collaboration with human rights, environmental, agrarian, and indigenous organizations, including UNACOOP R.L. (Costa Rican National Cooperative Union), Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales (Centre for Economic and Social Rights), Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action), and the Secoya, Siona, and Huaorani Indigenous peoples in Ecuador’s Amazon region. These projects, ranging from worker-owned cooperative agro-ecotourism in Costa Rica to the human rights impacts of extractive industries in Ecuador, established the long-term community relationships and the rigorous, participant-led methodology that underpins his current research-led documentary film practice and legal scholarship. This thirty-year trajectory demonstrates a consistent commitment to engaged research and provides the empirical depth required for producing impactful documentary films, like The Tribunal and Under Rich Earth, and for sustaining high-level policy influence in Business and Human Rights, thereby contributing to the University of Exeter’s mission to create a sustainable, healthy and social just future.

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Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Rogge welcomes research proposals in diverse fields, including:

• Business & Human Rights Law
• International Economic Law
• Rights of Nature
• Corporate Law
• Corporate Governance
• Law and Economic Theory
• Law and Development
• Legal History of the Corporation
• Legal Theory and Methodology
• Human Rights and Documentary Cinema
• Law and Film
• Law and Philosophy