Étienne Cossette-Lefebvre is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he teaches and researches in the areas of property law, the law of trusts, comparative private law, and legal theory. His research engages with foundational questions in the law of persons, privacy, obligations, and successions, and has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada (notably, in 6362222 Canada inc. v. Prelco inc., 2021 SCC 39). He is a currently a collaborator at the Observatory on Human Rights at the United Nations.
Prior to joining Osgoode, Cossette-Lefebvre taught Property Law at Queen’s University and the Law of Trusts at McGill University. He also served as Assistant Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law at McGill University, and was a research lawyer for the Court of Appeal of Québec as well as a law clerk for Justice Russell Brown of the Supreme Court of Canada
He is currently completing his doctorate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His dissertation offers innovative trans-systemic perspectives on the idea of self-ownership to explain a person’s rights over their body, image, voice, and personal information. He is a former Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and has held a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) Doctoral Award in Honour of Nelson Mandela.
Research Interests: the law of property, the law of persons, the law of privacy, the law of obligations, the law of successions, comparative law, legal theory and philosophy, and legal history.
Graduate Research Supervision (LLM, PhD): I am interested in supervising topics related to the law of property, the law of persons, the law of privacy, the law of obligations, the law of successions, comparative law, legal theory and philosophy, and legal history.