Former Osgoode Dean and Professor Mary Condon has been appointed as a member of the Central Bank of Ireland Commission for a five-year term beginning Jan. 1, 2024.

In the part-time role, Condon will join Central Bank of Ireland Governor Gabriel Makhlouf and the other members of the commission in carrying out its mandate to ensure that the statutory functions of the central bank are properly discharged. Her appointment was announced recently by Ireland’s Minister for Finance Michael McGrath.

Condon, a dual citizen of Canada and Ireland, said the opportunity will open fascinating new vistas to inform her longstanding research into securities law and financial regulation.

“One of the unique features of the Irish central bank is that it is responsible for regulating almost the entire financial sector in the country,” she explained.

“It’s responsible for regulating banking, insurance, capital markets and investment funds, which is quite different from the approach in Canada – where jurisdiction is either provincial or federal with respect to different components of the financial sector.”

She said the experience will be an interesting opportunity to see first-hand the differences in approach when the same regulator oversees different industries and institutions within the financial system.

Ireland, which remains a member of the European Union (EU), has had one of the fastest growing economies in Europe in recent years.

“They’ve had to adopt policies and laws that are EU-wide,” noted Condon. “So I’ll also be able to understand the EU dimensions of the financial regulatory system in more detail, as well.”

While some countries, like the United States, have multiple regulators at the state and federal levels, other nations, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, have adopted an approach that involves fewer regulators, she explained. Both Australia and the U.K. have separated the regulation of market conduct, in which financial services firms interact with clients, from so-called prudential regulation, which is aimed at ensuring the safety and soundness of financial institutions like banks. Ireland is unique in combining it all under one roof.

Condon has until recently served as a member of an advisory council to Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) CEO Grant Vingoe. In addition, she is a former vice-chair, commissioner and board member of the OSC, and in early 2018 she was appointed as a member of the board of the Capital Markets Authority Implementation Organization (CMAIO), an interim body that was set up to assist with the establishment of a capital markets regulatory authority for co-operating jurisdictions in Canada.

She served as dean of Osgoode Hall Law School from July 1, 2019 to Aug. 31, 2023 and as interim dean from May 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. In 2018, she was selected as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada (Public Sector Category) by the Toronto-based Women’s Executive Network. Between 2014 and 2016 she served as a member of Canada’s National Steering Committee for Financial Literacy. Her research interests are focused on securities law and financial regulation, pensions and feminist legal studies.

Who really owns your body – in life or in death?

It’s a fundamental legal question that has long fascinated Osgoode doctoral student Joshua Shaw – especially when it comes to death.

“How we dispose of the dead or body parts is often connected to broader relationships of power, which is interesting to me,” said Shaw, who currently serves as a lecturer in law at Kent Law School at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

The native of Brandon, Man., who expects to complete his PhD at Osgoode in early 2024, has titled his dissertation The Heteronomy of Flesh: A Minor Jurisprudence of the Use of the Human Dead and Tissues. Earlier this year, he was named as a 2023 co-recipient of the prestigious Austin Sarat Award, which is presented each year to a graduate or professional student for an outstanding paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. His paper, excerpted from his dissertation, is titled Humic Lawscapes.

“What is done with a body part or a dead body can often be quite sacred or even just a personally important decision,” said Shaw. “I would like to see laws that give individuals or communities the power to make their own determinations or decisions about what is done.”

Historically, that’s been far from the case – especially for marginalized groups. Weak laws, in turn, have helped lead to tragedies like the burial of Indigenous residential school students in unmarked graves in Canada or, globally, the trade in human body parts. Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that analyzes illicit financial flows, estimates that organ trafficking conservatively generates approximately US$840 million to $1.7 billion annually from about 12,000 illegal transplants.

In his dissertation, Shaw looks at the historical example of William Ramsay Smith, a Scottish physician, educator, naturalist and anthropologist who worked as a coroner in Australia in the early 1900s. His reputation was tarnished in 1903 when he was charged with the misuse of human remains. Despite this, he was later reinstated as a coroner and used his position to illicitly dissect and collect human remains of Aboriginal Australians.

“He was one of the major donors of Indigenous remains to the University of Edinburgh,” explained Shaw. “But this sense of having authority over the use of body parts, ostensibly in the public interest, ostensibly in serving scientific study, has been used to take tissues away from people and has often formed part of quite gross racist institutions.”

Shaw delves into some of these issues in the courses he is teaching this year at Kent Law School: Law and Medical Ethics, Healthcare Law and Ethics, Regulation of Healthcare and Assisted Dying.

As he explains in his Kent Law faculty bio, his critical and theoretical study of law, medicine and the dead has relevance to ethics and public policy, including the regulation of surgery, anatomy, synthetic biology, mortuary practices, and organ and tissue donation and transplantation.

“The history and contemporary issues in this area of law provide a lot of insight into how we approach or understand the human body and what we prioritize or value in terms of what is done with the body,” he explained. “And I think that’s what motivated me initially to focus on this area and continues to motivate me.”

Shaw’s doctoral research has been supported, in part, by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

On Wednesday, January 10, 2024, Osgoode Hall Law School will hold His Brilliant Legacy: A conference in honour of Peter W. Hogg at Osgoode Professional Development in downtown Toronto and online.

This conference will bring together leading judges, lawyers and academics to recognize and honour the legacy of the late dean and professor Peter W. Hogg.

Peter was best known as a leading authority on Canadian constitutional law, with the most academic citations in Supreme Court jurisprudence of any living scholar during his lifetime. Peter wrote several books, including Constitutional Law of Canada, the single most-cited book in decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. And in 2004, Peter was a key figure in the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in Canada in 2004.

The program will feature:

• four sitting judges of the Supreme Court of Canada;
• three current judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal; and
• leading academics from Canada and abroad.

In person registration is extremely limited and very few spots remain available. Register here.

In the midst of a global access-to-justice crisis, Osgoode Dean Trevor Farrow will join other international access-to-justice (A2J) research leaders at a special conference on Dec. 6 to discuss the creation of a global research action plan aimed at making legal services more available to those least able to afford their spiralling cost.

The conference, titled “Building Evidence for People-Centred Access to Justice: Envisioning a Shared Research Agenda,” will take place in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and is sponsored by the Justice Data Observatory, a partnership involving the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the American Bar Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

“I am excited and honoured to be collaborating with some of the world’s leading access-to-justice research experts and policymakers,” said Farrow. “We will explore challenging aspects of the growing global access-to-justice crisis, as well as potential data-based solutions.

“While it’s a busy time of term and there’s a lot going on,” he added, “this will also be a very important opportunity for me, as Dean, to champion and promote some of the great work that we’re doing here at Osgoode, as well as the major efforts that York University is making to address the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

Access to justice for all is part of the UN’s SDG number 16.

Participants at the event will explore opportunities for researchers, civil society actors and government representatives and policymakers from around the world to identify and address gaps in justice data and evidence with the aim of collectively advancing a shared access-to-justice research agenda through the Justice Data Observatory.

“Around the world, civil justice problems are ubiquitous,” reads a research brief for the event. “In every studied society, these problems affect every group, and they fall most heavily on marginalized groups, such as low-income communities or groups that are minoritized around their religion, ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender or disability.”

“To respond to these challenges effectively,” it adds, “we need a rigorous, evidence-based understanding of people’s and communities’ justice needs and of effective, scalable and sustainable solutions to meet those needs.”

The centrepiece panel discussion during the conference will follow a global report on access-to-justice research and data and will focus on the topic of “advancing people-centred access to justice through evidence-based policymaking.”

Alongside Farrow, who is also the chair of the Osgoode-based Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, guests on the panel will include Daniela Barba, the director of access-to-justice for the Washington, D.C.-based World Justice Project, Daniel Ricardo Cortes, director of the Justice, Security and Defense Directorate in Colombia, Maaike de Langen, a Senior Fellow at New York University, and Qudsiya Naqui, senior counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice.

It is expected that, with the OECD, World Bank and other partners, further research and reporting will follow from these upcoming discussions and initiatives.

Farrow is also a research and policy expert for the OECD’s access to justice advisory and a steering committee member for Canada’s Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, which was founded by former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin.

As she wandered the international corridors of power in Marrakesh, Morrocco, last month, Angela Bain ’21 mixed with world leaders and witnessed first-hand the neo-colonial clash of global haves and have-nots. It was an amazing journey and a possible steppingstone to an international legal career that began when she was a JD student at Osgoode.

Bain, who attributes her passion for international law to the international clinical and classroom experience she gained at Osgoode, attended the 2023 World Bank – International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings as a delegate with Toronto-based Young Diplomats of Canada, a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization that promotes the leadership of young Canadians through international delegations, research projects and advocacy initiatives.

She currently works for the federal Department of Justice, where her main client is Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

During the five-day World Bank-IMF event, she met with Canada’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen. It was the first time in 50 years that the boards of governors of the World Bank Group and the IMF had held their annual meeting in Africa.

While development issues dominated the event, said Bain, the climate crisis also took centre stage alongside other critical issues facing the global economy, including pandemic preparedness. Two sessions that stood out for her were focused on the problem of worldwide money laundering by organized crime and oligarchs. The sessions inspired Bain to write an article on money laundering for the independent global affairs website International Policy Digest.

She said she is working to advance her career in international law and international policy, where more diverse and younger voices and viewpoints are desperately needed.

In pursuing that goal, Osgoode gave her a distinct advantage, she said. In her second year, she explained, she had the “incredible” opportunity to work at the Canadian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva as a student in the International, Transnational, and Comparative Law Program. In her third year, she added, she participated in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot.

“These experiences complimented my coursework at Osgoode, which included Globalization and the Law, International Public Law, the International, Comparative and Transnational Law Capstone Seminar, and Refugee Law,” said Bain. “Overall, this inspired my passion for a career that combines international law and policy, development and diplomacy. And that passion motivated me to apply for Young Diplomats of Canada to learn more.”

Organizations like Young Diplomats of Canada offer an excellent opportunity for Osgoode students to witness international law and policymaking in action, she added.

“Often, policymaking seems like something that’s out of our hands or that happens in secretive discussions high up,” observed Bain. “So being able to observe it and see how the sausage is actually made puts you in a better position to criticize it – or you can imagine yourself contributing to it. I think that was super important.”