Victoria Sahani
Victoria Sahani was appointed Associate Provost for Community & Inclusion and professor of law in the School of Law in October 2022. In this role, Victoria helps guide BU’s efforts to ensure inclusive excellence of faculty and academic appointees, nurture a positive campus climate, and enhance diversity and inclusion within the academic program. She also provides leadership in implementing two essential pillars of BU’s 2030 Strategic Plan—“Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” and “Community—Big Yet Small”—as the University works to enhance the environment and opportunities it affords all members of the community. This includes a growing portfolio of programs, among them the Target of Opportunity Hiring Program, BU D&I STARS Program, University Scholars Program, and Faculty & Staff Community Networks, as well as the BU Arts Initiative, the Newbury Center, and the LGBTQIA+ Center for Faculty & Staff.
Victoria arrived at BU from the Sandra Day O’Connor Law School at Arizona State University (ASU), where she was a professor of law, associate dean of special projects, and director of the Faculty Inclusion for Research System Transformation (FIRST) university-wide initiative. Victoria began her law teaching career at Washington and Lee University School of Law (W&L) before joining ASU in 2017. Victoria is a productive, internationally recognized legal scholar in the fields of arbitration law and litigation finance law and an award-winning teacher. She worked extensively at ASU and W&L to develop policies, procedures, programs, and initiatives targeted at faculty recruitment, retention, and professional development to ensure inclusive excellence and attention to diversity among academic appointees. She likewise worked to nurture a campus-wide culture of inclusion and positivity at both schools with programs designed to foster awareness and commitment to issues of racial and ethnic difference, diversity, and inclusion.
Prior to teaching law, Victoria was deputy director of arbitration and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in North America for the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) International Court of Arbitration and deputy director of the Arbitration and ADR Committee of the US Council for International Business (USCIB). Before joining the ICC and USCIB, she practiced law and worked on affordable housing and community development real estate transactions, housing discrimination claims in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina, and matters involving American Indian law. She continues to hold several leadership positions in the international arbitration community, including chair of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, and published the first book in the world about her field, Third-Party Funding in International Arbitration (2nd ed., 2017), along with numerous book chapters and articles in top law reviews. She received her law degree from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree in psychology from Harvard College and remains an active member of the bar in New York and the District of Columbia.