Expertise: Environmental Law

McGregor, Deborah

Professor Deborah McGregor joined York University’s Osgoode Hall law faculty in 2015 as a cross-appointee with the Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change. Professor McGregor’s research has focused on Indigenous knowledge systems and their various applications in diverse contexts including water and environmental governance, environmental justice, forest policy and management, and sustainable development. Her research has been published in a variety of national and international journals and she has delivered numerous public and academic presentations relating to Indigenous knowledge systems, governance and sustainability. She co-edited Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age with Mario Blaser, Ravi De Costa and William Coleman (2010). She is co-editor (with Alan Corbiere, Mary Ann Corbiere and Crystal Migwans) of the Anishinaabewin conference proceedings series.

Professor McGregor, who is Anishinaabe from Whitefish River First Nation, Birch Island, Ontario, is the Primary Investigator on two current SSHRC-funded projects:

Indigenous Environmental (In)Justice: theory and practice. (Insight Grant). Co-applicants: Dayna Nadine Scott (Osgoode Hall Law School), Brenda Murphy (Wilfred Laurier University), Martha Stiegman (Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change). Collaborators: Mary Ann Corbiere (Laurentian University), Kathleen Padulo (Chiefs of Ontario), Sue Chiblow (Garden River First Nation), Nancy DeLeary (Chippewas of the Thames).

Indigenizing the First Nations Land Management Regime. (Insight Development Grant). Co-applicants: Heather Dorries (Carleton University) and Gabrielle Slowey (York University).

She is a co-applicant in two other current SSHRC projects:

Indigenous Knowledge Transfer in Urban Aboriginal Communities with Professor Kim Anderson (Wilfred Laurier University); and Exploring Distinct Indigenous Knowledge Systems to Inform Fisheries Governance and Management on Canada’s Coasts with Professor Lucia Fanning (Dalhousie University).

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor McGregor was an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto and served as Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives and the Aboriginal Studies program. She has also served as Senior Policy Advisor, Aboriginal Relations at Environment Canada-Ontario Region. In addition to such posts, Professor McGregor remains actively involved in a variety of Indigenous communities, serving as an advisor and continuing to engage in community-based research and initiatives.

Professor McGregor coordinated an Indigenous Environmental Justice (IEJ) Symposium in May 2016 featuring the voices of women and youth. She also recently launched an IEJ website.

Research Interests: Indigenous environmental justice, Indigenous governance and law, sustainability, water governance and security, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

Scott, Dayna N.

Professor Dayna Nadine Scott was appointed as York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy in 2018. She is cross-appointed with York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change. Professor Scott is a Co-Director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic and a Co-Coordinator of the joint MES/JD program.

Professor Scott joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2006 after completing a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at McGill’s Faculty of Law and a Hauser Global Research Fellowship at NYU. Professor Scott’s research interests focus on contestation over extraction; exercises of Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and resources; the distribution of pollution burdens affecting marginalized communities and vulnerable populations; gender and environmental health; and the justice dimensions of the transition to a greener economy.

Professor Scott is currently the co-Principal Investigator, with Professor Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark of the University of Victoria’s Center for Indigenous Research and Community-led Engagement (CIRCLE), of a project funded by the SSHRC New Frontiers in Research Fund called “Jurisdiction Back: Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism”. In a partnership between the Yellowhead Institute, the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning and York University, this project includes 14 academics and land defenders from across the country pursuing research oriented towards how the “just transition” to sustainable economies can be imagined and infrastructured to restore Indigenous jurisdiction, laws and governance systems.

Professor Scott has been the Primary Investigator on several SSHRC-funded projects, including “Consent & Contract: Authorizing Extraction in Ontario’s Ring of Fire” with colleagues Andrée Boisselle, Deborah McGregor and Estair Van Wagner, and the Partnership Development Grant, “Reconciling Sovereignties: New Techniques for ‘Authorizing’ Extraction on Indigenous Territories” led by Professor Shiri Pasternak, in partnership with the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade (INET) and MiningWatch Canada.  She also completed research in partnership with environmental justice activists from the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, near Sarnia`s Chemical Valley, that applied a critical, feminist perspective to the examination of law’s treatment of the risks of long-term, low-dose exposures to pollutants, and another SSHRC-funded project (“Investigating Regulatory Chill”) that examined constraints on regulation to protect the environment, with a focus on investor rights in the resource extraction context.

Professor Scott and collaborators recently completed a major report for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada entitled, “Implementing a Regional, Indigenous-Led, and Sustainability-Informed Impact Assessment in Ontario’s Ring of Fire.” This project was undertaken in partnership with Chief and Council of Neskantaga First Nation, a remote Anishinaabe community in Ontario’s far north..

Recent publications explore impact-benefit agreements in “Extraction Contracting: The Struggle for Control of Indigenous Lands” (2020) in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, co-edited with Shiri Pasternak; “Extractivism” in Mariana Valverde, Kamari Clarke, Eve Darian-Smith and Prabha Kotiswaran, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); the resurgence of Indigenous law in Treaty 9, with Andrée Boisselle (2019 UNB Law Review); the dynamics of “sacrifice zones” in the context of the emerging green energy economy (McGill Law Journal 2017, with Adrian A. Smith); anti-toxics politics (“Wanna-be Toxic Free? From Precautionary Consumption to Corporeal Citizenship” in Environmental Politics 2016); and the tactics of activists resisting tar sands extraction in Peace River Alberta (“‘We are the Monitors Now’: Experiential Knowledge, Transcorporeality and Environmental Justice” (2015) in Social & Legal Studies).

Professor Scott is the co-editor with Professor Deborah Curran, of a new journal of Canadian Environmental Law scholarship, the editor of Our Chemical Selves: Gender, Toxics and Environmental Health (UBC Press, 2015) and the past Director of the National Network on Environments and Women`s Health. Among other awards, Professor Scott has been a recipient of a York-Massey Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Law Commission of Canada’s “Audacity of Imagination” Prize.

Mgbeoji, Ikechi

Following five years of practice in civil litigation specializing in Commercial Litigation and Intellectual Property Law, Professor Mgbeoji enrolled in the graduate program of Dalhousie University where he graduated, summa cum laude, with an LLM in 1999. A recipient of the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for the highest academic standing at the graduate level in Dalhousie University, he undertook his doctoral research in Patent Law, graduating, summa cum laude, in 2001. Throughout his academic career, Professor Mgbeoji has won numerous academic awards, scholarships and fellowships including the Killam Scholarship and the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft Award.  His teaching and research interests are in Patent Law, Trademarks, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, International Law on the Use of Force, International Environmental Law, Biotechnology and Law, Comparative Intellectual Property Law, Indigenous Peoples, and Anthropology. Professor Mgbeoji is the author of two books – Collective Insecurity: The Liberian Crisis, Unilateralism, & Global Order and Patents and Indigenous Peoples – and he is the co-author of Environmental Law in Developing Countries: Selected Issues. Prior to joining Osgoode in July 2003, he taught at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law.

Emond, D. Paul

Paul Emond began his law teaching and research career at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Law in 1973. He joined Osgoode Hall Law School in 1976, where his teaching subjects have included: Property Law; Environmental Protection Law; Environmental Assessment Law; Land Use Planning; Administrative Law (and two advanced administrative law seminars); Native Rights; Resources Law and several courses in the field of negotiations, conflict and dispute resolution. Since 1994, Professor Emond has been the Director of Osgoode’s Professional LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution, the first program of its kind in North America and one that has been offered for 14 consecutive years through Osgoode Professional Development.

Since the mid-1990s, Professor Emond’s research and teaching interests have been in the dispute resolution field. He edited and contributed to Commercial Dispute Resolution (1989); co-authored Mediation Advocacy (1998) and, most recently, contributed a chapter to Representative Negotiation (2007). Professor Emond has supervised more than 150 MPRs (graduate level major research papers and projects) and regularly supervises two to three PhD students per year, all in the dispute resolution field. In 2000, Professor Emond was the co-recipient of the OBA Award of Excellence in Alternative Dispute Resolution.

In addition to his teaching, research and graduate supervision, Professor Emond has served as a member of the Environmental Appeal Board; co-chaired the Working Group on the Environment and Taxation for the Fair Tax Commission; and organized conferences and workshops on topics as diverse as dispute resolution, collaborative law and legal expert systems. Professor Emond is much in demand as a workshop leader, trainer and conference speaker on topics in the conflict management, dispute resolution and negotiation fields. From time to time, Professor Emond is retained as a mediator or negotiation tactician on disputes ranging from highly complex multi-party public disputes to two-to-three party commercial disputes.

Research Interests: Public Law, Legal Process, Environmental Law