About Research at Osgoode

For a Law School that seeks to evolve and thrive in a fast, globalizing knowledge society, innovation lies at the heart of the School’s research and teaching endeavours. Osgoode Hall Law School’s ongoing knowledge innovation focuses on an education and research agenda that fosters critical thinking about the role of the law in an ever more complex society, which is characterized by shifting boundaries between public and private governance structures, spheres of societal self-regulation and interventionism. Lawyers are increasingly called upon to reassert the law’s particular voice in the transnational quest for solutions to governance challenges that range from security threats, social justice, self-determination and climate control to corporate fraud, the future of collective interest representation and new patterns of intimate life.

As such, legal researchers by necessity have to embrace comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, from history, social sciences and economics. As the scope of research areas happens to grow, diversify and change during a legal academic’s lifetime, the expectations of our young graduates have expanded in similarly dramatic ways. Whether a graduate’s path leads her to criminal, corporate, family, environmental or aboriginal law, a young lawyer today is expected to be equipped not only with a good, unerring ‘sense of justice’, but also with solid, cutting-edge general and sufficiently specialized knowledge of the many, fast-growing branches of the law.

The pressure on researchers and teachers of law to further instill our graduates with this intricate combination of deep and broad knowledge is what drives Osgoode's intellectual life. ‘No course is taught twice’, emerges as the motto for Osgoode’s teaching mandate, built on constant updating, rethinking and amending. At home in the world’s law schools, research centres and academic discourses, Osgoode faculty members workshop and expose their research findings in a vibrant, critical worldwide discourse. Coming home to the classroom, Osgoode students are confronted with fresh ideas, conceptualized and shaped within a borderless scholarly discussion among lawyers around the globe.

Research takes many forms: multi-layered, historical, comparative, interdisciplinary explorations of doctrines, concepts and principles, documented in course syllabi, academic articles and books, conference papers, expert witness testimony, domestic and foreign consultancy, and commission reports. Research is the work that never stops.

Osgoode is home to a number of highly reputed and innovative research centres and units:

• The IFLS Institute for Feminist Legal Studies hosts visiting scholars from around the world, organizes the open-to-all, “Feminist Fridays” Theory Seminars and annually hosts the Distinguished Barbara Betcherman Fellowship in Feminist Legal Studies.

• The Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security [http://nathanson.osgoode.yorku.ca/] offers annual research fellowships to graduate students and hosts international workshops and lectures. In the fall of 2007, the Nathanson Centre was home to the widely noted “After Arar” Seminar Series, exploring the context and the consequences of Canadian citizen Maher Arar’s abduction from the United States to Syria.

• Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Osgoode is the home of the interdisciplinary CLPE (Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Network) (www.comparativeresearch.net), which hosts annual international conferences and publishes the first, interdisciplinary Research Paper Series through the Social Science Research Network (http://ssrn.com) for papers combining perspectives from law, economics, sociology, political science and history, and offers CLPE Fellows in Law the opportunity to conduct research at Osgoode. Osgoode’s CLPE Research Papers are frequent recipients of SSRN Top-Ten rankings.

• A second, CFI-funded research unit is the CRL (Critical Research Laboratory for multimedia projects on global cities), which provides an unparalleled research and interaction forum for social scientists, documentary film makers, digital artists and photographers working on global cities. (www.criticalresearchlab.org).

For more information on these initiatives, see here.

Research at Osgoode is on the move!

Peer Zumbansen
Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations)
Canada Research Chair in the Transnational and Comparative Law of Corporate Governance

PZumbansen@osgoode.yorku.ca

RESEARCH

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