Expertise: Family Law

Mykitiuk, Roxanne

Roxanne Mykitiuk is a Full Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where she engages in research and teaching in the areas of Disability Law, Health Law, Bioethics and Family Law. She is the founder and Director of the Disability Law Intensive clinical program and the Director of Osgoode’s part-time LLM program specializing in Health Law. She is a member of the core faculty in the graduate program in Critical Disability Studies at York University.  From 2018-2021 Professor Mykitiuk was the Faculty Co-Chair of Enable York and was the Chair of York University’s Senate from 2013-2015.

Professor Mykitiuk is nationally and internationally recognized for her work in disability law and the regulation of reproductive and genetic technologies and reproductive health more generally.  From 1990-1992 she was Senior Legal Researcher for the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. From 2002-2006 she was a member of the Ontario Advisory Committee on Genetics and from 2005-2008, she was a member of the Ethics Committee of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada. In 2009 Professor Mykitiuk was scholar in residence at the Law Commission of Ontario working on the Disability and Law Project. She is currently on the Board of Directors of ARCH Disability Law Clinic. Professor Mykitiuk has been consulted by a range of actors in policy making and litigation contexts and provided expert opinion related to her areas of expertise.

Professor Mykitiuk is an active, engaged and collaborative researcher. She is the author or co-author of numerous articles, book chapters and books investigating the legal, ethical and social implications of reproductive and genetic technologies and the legal construction and regulation of embodiment and disability.  Some of her more recent research created and investigated arts-based methods – digital stories and drama-based narratives – as a means of challenging and re-representing experiences, images and conceptions of disability and normalcy.

Professor Mykitiuk’s research has been funded by CIHR, SSHRC, the Australian Research Council, Genome Canada and the European Research Council, among other funding bodies.

In a currently funded SSHRC project, she is using legal research and digital story making to investigate episodic disability in the workplace and to assist employers to adopt policies that are accommodating to the needs of variously positioned workers with episodic disabilities. With a York Innovation funded grant, Professor Mykitiuk is working with colleagues in nursing and in digital media to devise a cell phone resource to support the communication and accommodation needs of students with disabilities and instructors in clinical placements. And as part of a New Frontiers in Research Fund, supporting research on Zero-Gravity 3D Bioprinting of Super-Soft Materials, she is combining her interests in the regulation of embodiment, health law and new technologies to better understand how to regulate in this new area of research and development. Under an NSERC CREATE grant, she is contributing to a collaborative project on artificial intelligence in aerospace engineering, with her contribution focussing on equity, diversity and inclusion issues presently and potentially engaged in the area.

Research Interests: Disability Law, critical disability studies, feminist legal studies, law and embodiment, genetic and reproductive technologies, critical science and technology studies and law, health law, family law, reproductive health law.

Mossman, Mary Jane

Professor Emerita Mary Jane Mossman joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 1976-77, after several years as a faculty member in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales. At Osgoode, she served as Associate Dean, Assistant Dean, Chair of Faculty Council, and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, as well as numerous positions on Boards and committees at York University. Her research interests focus on women lawyers/legal professions; family law and economic dependency; property law and trusts; and access to justice and legal aid.

She has authored numerous scholarly articles and reports for governments and other organizations, and has been a Visiting Professor at a number of universities in Canada, the United States, Australia, France and Japan. In 2006, she published The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (Hart Pub 2006); and is currently authoring a study of women lawyers in Ontario 1890s to 1960s, as well as other writing projects. Her co-authored books include Families and the Law (2nd Captus ed 2015); Property Law: Cases and Commentary (3rd ed Emond Pub 2014); and Reconsidering Knowledge: Feminism and the Academy (Fernwood 2012).

Professor Mossman was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal for work with the Vanier Institute of the Family (2012); the Lexpert Zenith Award: Leadership for Change (2012); appointment as “University Professor” at York U (2007); the Bora Laskin Fellowship in Human Rights (SSHRC 2007); the Ontario Government Leadership in Faculty Teaching  Award (2007); an honorary doctorate by the Law Society of Upper Canada (2004); the Award of Excellence of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers (2004); the Medal of the Law Society of Upper Canada (1990); the Supporter of the Year award by the Advocacy Resource Centre for the Handicapped (1988); and the CBAO Distinguished Service Award (1987).

She has received research grants from SSHRC and the Canadian Bar Association Foundation for Legal Research, and was appointed the Gordon Henderson Chair in Human Rights (University of Ottawa 1995) and the Walter L Gordon Fellowship (York University 2004). She was admitted as a Barrister in New South Wales in 1975 and a member of the Bar of Ontario in 1977; and served as junior counsel in an Australian appeal to the Privy Council in 1978. From 1979-1982, she was on leave from Osgoode as the first Clinic Funding Manager for the Ontario Legal Aid Plan, and she has provided ongoing support to community legal clinics, including serving on several clinic Boards. Since 1997, she has chaired the Administrative Committee of the Unifor/CAW Legal Services Plan.

Kierstead, Shelley

Professor Shelley Kierstead’s research interests lie in the areas of family law, access to justice, and dispute resolution.  She has also conducted research in the conflict of laws area, completing a Master of Laws degree focusing on this topic at the University of Toronto 1993.  Professor Kierstead first taught Legal Research and Writing (LRW) at Osgoode in 1993, and became Director of the LRW program at Osgoode in 2002. In 2005, she completed a doctoral dissertation in the family law area and obtained a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Osgoode Hall Law School.  Since 1997, Professor Kierstead has also coordinated a parent education program for separating parents entitled the “Parent Information Program.” This program is an initiative of Osgoode’s Centre for Public Law and Public Policy. Research Interests: Family Law, Legal Process

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

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