Expertise: Comparative Law

Berger, Benjamin L.

Professor Benjamin L. Berger is Professor and York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Professor Berger served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018. He holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. Prior to joining Osgoode, he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, and was cross-appointed in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Victoria, where he began teaching in 2004. He holds a JSD and LLM from Yale University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar and a SSHRC doctoral fellow. He earned his LLB and the Law Society Gold Medal from the University of Victoria, and was awarded the Gold Medal in Arts and the Governor General’s Academic Medal for his BA (Hons) studies at the University of Alberta. In 2002-2003, Professor Berger served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada.

His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence.  He has published broadly in these fields and his work has appeared in leading legal and interdisciplinary journals and edited collections.  He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and served as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society from 2014-2018. He is also co-editor of multiple edited collections, including Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority (Hart, 2016) and The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). He has been a principal investigator or collaborator on multiple research grants and has received awards for his scholarly work, including the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination” and, in 2015, the CALT-ACPD Prize for Academic Excellence.

Professor Berger is active in judicial, professional, and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. While at UVic Law, Professor Berger twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award. He received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.

Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought and is the Academic Program Director of the Osgoode Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure.

Research Interests: Law and Religion; Criminal and Constitutional Law and Theory; the Law of Evidence; Legal History; Judgment and the Judiciary; Law and the Humanities.

Tanguay-Renaud, François

Professor François Tanguay-Renaud has been a professor at Osgoode since 2008. He is currently the Program Director of the Osgoode Certificate in the Laws of Emergency, and of the Professional LLM in Canadian Common Law. From 2012 until 2021, he was Director of York’s Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security  (a position he shared with Professor Heidi Matthews from 2018 to 2021). He is also one of the founders and first Director of York’s Juris Doctor/Master of Arts (JD/MA) combined program in law and philosophy, and a former Associate Dean Research, Graduate Studies, and Institutional Relations.

Professor Tanguay-Renaud holds degrees in both civil and common law from McGill University, where he was both a Loran Scholar and a Greville-Smith Scholar. He also studied at the National University of Singapore, and completed his graduate work (BCL, MPhil, DPhil) at the University of Oxford, where he was in turn a Rhodes Scholar, holder of the Studentship of the Centre for Ethics and Philosophy of Law, as well as doctoral fellow of the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) and of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Tanguay-Renaud was a Lecturer in Law at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Marie Deschamps of the Supreme Court of Canada, and worked with the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development and the Asian Network for Free Elections in Thailand, as well as with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Since starting at Osgoode, he has held Visiting Professor appointments at the University of Minnesota Law School (Robina Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice), the University of Oxford (H.L.A. Hart Fellow), the National University of Singapore, the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics and Faculty of Law, Massey College, and the National Law School of India University (NLSIU). He currently also holds an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of McMaster University.

His current academic interests span a wide range of subject areas — but notably, criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional and public law, emergency law, AI and the law, and public international law — viewed mostly through the lens of analytical legal theory. He is editor of Rethinking Criminal Law Theory: New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational, and International Criminal Law (with James Stribopoulos, Hart Publishing, 2012), From Morality to Law and Back Again: Liber Amicorum for John Gardner (with Michelle Madden Dempsey, Oxford University Press, 2023), and has published articles in leading journals such as Ethics, Legal Theory, Res Publica, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, the UBC Law Review, the Asian Yearbook of International Law, as well as in many leading edited collections.  He currently holds an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a research project on “Reconceiving Procedural Fairness” in light of the advent of Artificial Intelligence (with Vincent Chiao).

Professor Tanguay-Renaud regularly teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, emergency law, the philosophical foundations of criminal law, jurisprudence, and the rule of law. He was the recipient of the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2017, and of the Osgoode Hall Law School Faculty Service Award in 2020.

Research Interests: Theory of criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional and public law, international law, and associated areas of political and moral philosophy; the regulation of state surveillance; artificial intelligence and the law (with a focus on criminal law); emergencies and the law; jurisprudence; the rule of law; collective, corporate, and state responsibility; war ethics; Canadian, American and South Asian constitutional law and politics.

Priel, Dan

Dan Priel joined Osgoode’s full-time faculty in 2011.  Prior to that, he was a Visiting Professor at Osgoode during the 2010-11 academic year and an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick in the UK. From 2005 to 2007, he was Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow-in-Law at Yale Law School, and before that a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation. He served as law clerk in the Israeli Supreme Court, and was co-editor-in-chief of the student-edited law journal at the Hebrew University Law Faculty. His current research interests include legal theory, private law (especially tort law and restitution), and he is also interested in legal history and in the application of the social sciences, in particular psychology, to legal research. His published work appeared in Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and Texas Law Review.

Li, Jinyan

Jinyan Li is Professor of Tax Law and former Interim Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is currently the co-director of the LLM Tax program and academic director, Professional Graduate Studies Program.

Professor Li has authored, co-authored and co-edited numerous books, including: Income Tax at 100 Years: Essays and Reflections on the Income War Tax Act (2017); International Taxation in Canada (multiple editions); Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law (multiple editions); International Taxation in the Age of Electronic Commerce: A Comparative Study, and International Taxation in China: A Contextualized Analysis. She is the co-author chapter 13 (Capital Gains) of the Global Tax Treaty Commentaries on IBFD Tax Research Platform. She is the co-editor of Current Tax Readings, Canadian Tax Journal and a member of the editorial board of World Tax Journal. She has organized conferences and symposiums, the most recent of which are a symposium on Pillar Two (2022) and Women with Disabilities: Income Security and Tax Policy (2022).

Her work has been cited by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada in Deans Knight Income Corp., Alta Energy and MacDonald.

She has recently served on the Panel of Experts advising the Minister of Finance, Canada on reviewing tax expenditures and a member of the advisory committee to the Minister of National Revenue on the taxation of e-commerce. She has also been a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Auditor General of Canada, and the Department of Justice of Canada.

Professor Li has received numerous awards from external organizations, including: Tax Excellence Award (2021) from the Ontario Bar Association),  Lifetime Contribution Award (2017) from the Canadian Tax Foundation, Academic Excellence Award (2007) from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers, and D.J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award (1999). She was a York University Research Leader (2017) and recipient of teaching awards (2004 and 2014). She is currently on the Council of IFA Canada and a speaker at Canadian and international conferences.

Hay, Douglas C.

Professor Emeritus Douglas Hay was cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and York’s Department of History in 1981, teaching the comparative history of criminal procedure, punishment, and crime, and the history of private law in the common law world. He was co- director of an international project on the evolution of the contract of employment: Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (2004) and other titles, most recently ‘Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour and Law in Industrialization’ in Law With Class: Essays Inspired by the Work of Harry Glasbeek (2019) and ‘The Master and Servant Statute of 1823: Enlarging the Powers of Justices Act’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 43 (2022), 3-23.

Other work includes the English high court’s criminal jurisdiction (Criminal Cases on the Crown Side of King’s Bench 1740-1800 (2010); ‘Hanging and the English Judges: The Judicial Politics of Retention and Abolition,’ in America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (2010); D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, E.P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (2nd edition, with new introductions, 2011); ‘E.P. Thompson and the Rule of Law: Qualifying the Unqualified Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (2021), 202-220; and the ‘Preface’ to the concluding volume of Canadian State Trials, vol.5 (2022).
Professor Hay is presently writing about the administration of the criminal law in Georgian England, the role of the judiciary in King’s Bench, and the comparative history of criminal procedure in the British Empire. He has published books and articles on the history of English and Quebec criminal law; history of criminal procedure; social history of crime; judicial biography; courts and their political significance; and the history of employment law. He has been a visitor at Yale, Warwick, and Columbia law schools, and has been on the boards of the Canadian Historical Review, Law and History Review, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society for Legal History. He has given the Chorley Lecture (London School of Economics), the Iredell Lecture in Legal History (University of Lancaster), The Hugh Alan Maclean Lecture (University of Victoria Faculty of Law), the Weir Memorial Lecture (University of Alberta School of Law), the Annual Lecture for the American Society of Legal History, the Hugh Fitzpatrick Lecture in Legal Bibliography (Dublin), and the Richard Youard Lecture in Legal History (Oxford University). He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History in 2013, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Social Sciences) in 2016.

Geva, Benjamin

Dr. Benjamin Geva is a Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He specializes in (domestic, comparative and international) commercial, financial and banking law, particularly in payment and credit instruments, fund transfers, electronic transferable transport documents, letters of credit, electronic banking, central banking, money & currency, digital currencies, and assets, and the regulation of the payment system. He obtained his LLB (cum laude) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1970) and his LLM and SJD at Harvard, and was admitted to the Ontario Bar in 1982. He has been on the Osgoode faculty since 1977. He practised with Blake, Cassels and Graydon in Toronto and is now (part-time) counsel with Torys where he is a member of the Payments and Cards Practice Group.

He was awarded prestigious competitive grants among others by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Foundation of Legal Research of the Canadian Bar Association and has written extensively in his areas of expertise, including a monograph on Financing Consumer Sales and Product Defences in Canada and the US (Toronto: Carswell, 1984), a treatise on the Law of Electronic Funds Transfer (New York: Matthew Bender, 1992, kept current with annual updates (since 1997 with contributors) until 2020, a comparative law text on Bank Collections and Payment Transactions (Oxford: OUP, 2001), a monograph on The Payment Order of Antiquity and the Middle Ages – A Legal History (Oxford and Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2011), and a text co-written with Dr. Sagi Peari on International Negotiable Instruments (Oxford: OUP, 2020).  As well, he is the founding editor in chief of the Banking and Finance Law Review (BFLR) (1986- 2018) and is now Chair of its Advisory Board.

He held visiting positions, in the United States at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Utah and Northwestern University as well as in the summer program of Duke University in Hong Kong; in Israel at Tel Aviv University; in Australia in Monash, Deakin, Melbourne and Sydney Universities; in Singapore at the National University of Singapore, in Germany in the University of Hamburg, and in France at the faculté de droit et de science politique d’Aix-Marseille. He has been a Visitor at the law faculties of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England and at Max-Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law in Hamburg (Germany), as well as a Senior Global Research Fellow at the Hauser Global Visitors Program at New York University School of Law, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna (Austria), and Visiting Scholar at the International Trade Law Division of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, (the substantive secretariat of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) in Vienna).

Under the IMF technical assistance program he has advised and drafted key financial sector and payment systems legislation for the authorities of several countries, particularly, on missions for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Haiti, Serbia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and Sri Lanka. For UNCITRAL he has been working on electronic transferable transport documents.  Both  in Canada and  the United States and  also in the international arena he has been either a member or an observer in legislative committees and drafting working or study groups in the areas of personal property security, securities transfers, letters of credits & independent guarantees, and payment laws.

His current research is on digital currencies and assets, payment and settlement laws and systems,  electronic transferable transport documents, and a text on General Principles of Canadian Law on Negotiable Instruments and Payment Transactions (to be published by Irwin Law)

Drummond, Susan G.

Professor Susan Drummond joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1999, and specializes in the areas of legal anthropology, comparative law, civil law, family law, and wills and estates. She was the first student in Canada to graduate with both a civil and common law degree as well as a Master’s in Social Work. She has a doctorate in law from McGill University. Her BA in philosophy and her postgraduate Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies from the Université d’Aix-Marseille, specializing in legal theory and legal anthropology, make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar. Beyond her publications in scholarly journals, she has published three books, Incorporating the Familiar: An Investigation into Legal Sensibilities in Nunavik, based on fieldwork on the interactions between state and non-state criminal law sensibilities in Inuit communities in northern Quebec; Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities, based on field work on non-state family law in Andalucia, which won the Canadian Law and Society Association/Association canadienne droit et société 2006 Book Prize; and Unthinkable Thoughts; Academic Freedom and the One State Model for Israel and Palestine, based on fieldwork on the intersections between politically controversial ideas and the Canadian academy, was published in November, 2013.

Professor Drummond is currently engaged in an extensive, fine-grained ethnographic study of elder law, elder financial abuse, and estates and trust law and litigation in Ontario, with a focus on legal practice, legal ethics, and legal professionalism in the associated bar.

Research Interests: Family Law, Estates and Trusts, Legal Theory, Comparative Law, Legal Anthropology

Boisselle, Andrée

Andrée Boisselle’s research interests are in the areas of indigenous law, comparative and constitutional law, pluralism and postcolonial legal theory.  She is currently completing her doctorate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.  Her doctoral research on Stó:lõ constitutionalism and the Coast Salish legal tradition has been supported by scholarships from the Trudeau Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  Her master’s thesis critically examined the development of the duty to consult First Nations in Canadian law.  It received the Quebec Association of Law Professors Prize in 2008.  Before pursuing graduate studies, she practised litigation in Québec with McCarthy Tétrault LLP and did contractual work with the Supreme Court of Canada.

Bhabha, Faisal

Faisal Bhabha is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the Canadian Common Law LLM degree program. He has researched and published in the areas of constitutional law, multiculturalism, law and religion, disability rights, national security and access to justice. He teaches constitutional law, human rights, legal ethics, and appellate advocacy. Previously, he sat as Vice-chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (2008-2011). He maintains a varied public and private law practice, appearing before administrative boards and tribunals and at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He advises and represents a variety of individuals and public interest organizations in matters pertaining to constitutional law and human rights. He has appeared as an expert witness before Canadian parliamentary committees and served as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Ontario. He has lived and worked in the Middle East and South Africa, and has lectured and taught in many countries. He is currently a senior editor with the International Review of Human Rights Law.

Research Interests: constitutional law; equality and anti-discrimination; administrative law; legal ethics and professionalism; legal process; dispute resolution; legal education