Expertise: Criminal 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.

Boittin, Margaret

Professor Boittin is the author of The Regulation of Prostitution in China: Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Based on ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys, the book examines how the regulation of prostitution shapes both the lives of female sex workers and the frontline police officers and public health officials who are responsible for implementing the laws and policies that govern sex work in China. Boittin also conducts research on the regulation of human trafficking and forced labor. She has carried out randomized controlled trials examining rights awareness campaigns on labor abuse of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, and on attitudes and behaviors pertaining to human trafficking vulnerability of both the general population and police officers in Nepal.  Her research has been supported by the US Department of Labor, USAID, Humanity United, and the National Science Foundation.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, and her JD from Stanford. Her articles have been published in Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, and American Political Science Review.

Young, Alan N.

Alan Young is the Co-Founder and former Director of Osgoode’s Innocence Project, which is a clinical program that guides JD students through the process of investigating suspected cases of wrongful conviction and imprisonment. He also maintains a small practice specializing in criminal law and procedure that is primarily devoted to challenging state authority to criminalize consensual activity.

He has brought constitutional challenges to our gambling, obscenity, bawdy-house and drug laws, and for nearly two decades has provided free legal services to those whose alternative lifestyles have brought them into conflict with the law.  He has represented countless numbers of people suffering from AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis who were charged after using marijuana for medicinal purposes, and as a result of these cases, the Federal Government was compelled to create a regulatory program authorizing the use of medical marijuana.  In addition to his work in the area of consensual crime, Professor Young has also provided free legal services to victims of violent crime and to individuals attempting to sue the government for malicious prosecution.

Canadian Lawyer magazine has recognized the contributions Professor Young has made to the law, and named him one of the “Top 25 Most Influential” in the justice system and legal profession in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. He is the author of Justice Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers and Lawyers (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003).

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.

Gavigan, Shelley A. M.

Shelley Gavigan is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, having retired as Professor of Law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in January 2017. She is a retired member of the Law Society of Ontario and the Law Society of Saskatchewan. She was a member of the Osgoode faculty for 31 years and taught courses in criminal law, family law, poverty law and children and the law. She was appointed Osgoode’s Associate Dean twice and served four terms as Academic Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services. She began her legal career as a lawyer in community legal clinics in Saskatchewan and was the first Director of Complaints/ Compliance with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.

Her research and scholarship are significantly interdisciplinary, located primarily in legal history, socio-legal studies, feminist legal studies, clinical legal education, and social justice.  She is the author of  Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Osgoode Society with UBC, Press, 2012), which won the Canadian History Association’s 2013 CLIO Prize – The Prairies (awarded for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions to regional history) and was short-listed and received Honourable Mention for both the CHA’s 2013 prize awarded annually to the best scholarly book in Canadian history and the 2012 Canadian Law & Society Association’s Annual Book Prize for “an outstanding contribution to the study of law and society.”

Professor Gavigan’s research into the criminal and civil court records of nineteenth century North West Territories continues, as does her work focussed on ‘historicizing criminalization’ of Canada’s indigenous peoples.  Her recent scholarship includes, “Getting Their Man: The NWMP as Accused in the Territorial Criminal Court in the Canadian North-West, 1876-1903” in Lyndsay Campbell, Ted McCoy & Melanie Méthot, eds., Canada’s Legal Pasts:  Looking Forward, Looking Back (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2020) 179.

Research Interests: Socio-Legal Studies, Legal History, Criminal Law, Feminist Legal Studies, Family Law, Clinical Education