Expertise: Legal Process (Civil Litigation; Dispute Resolution)

Watson, Garry D.

Professor Garry Watson joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1966 and has been a Visiting Professor at universities in Canada, the United States, Israel and (his native) Australia. He taught Trial Practice and Class Actions. His teaching of these courses was been augmented by his experience in private practice with a Toronto law firm and his appearances before the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. From 1991 to 1994, he was Director of Professional Development at the firm of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.
Professor Watson research interests include civil procedure, class actions and civil justice reform. He is widely known for his civil procedure books: Watson & McGowan, Ontario Civil Practice (2 volumes), Holmested & Watson, Ontario Civil Procedure (6 volumes). His numerous papers and articles deal with various aspects of civil litigation and civil justice reform. His current research is focused on the operation of Canada’s class action legislation and the comparative study of similar regimes in other countries.

He was a member of the Ontario Civil Rules Committee (1983-2005), and continues to be a member of its research arm, the Rules Secretariat. He was also a member of New Brunswick’s Civil Procedure Advisory Committee as well as Manitoba’s Queen’s Bench Rules Revision Committee.

He is the founder and Director of Osgoode Hall Law School’s Intensive Trial Advocacy Workshop held every summer since 1979. This is a NITA style program that brings 120 young lawyers into the law school for 8 days of trial advocacy training with a faculty of more than 60 lawyers and judges.

Professor Watson established the National Class Action Symposium (for the Osgoode Professional Development Program) and chairs the Planning Committee and the Symposium, which is held in Toronto each spring.

Walker, Janet

Janet Walker is a full professor and past Associate Dean. She currently teaches private international law, international commercial arbitration and complex litigation in the JD and the professional LLM programs and is Director of the Professional LLM in Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution. She has also taught Civil Procedure, Professional Responsibility and International Business Transactions and has served as Convener of the Litigation, Dispute Resolution and the Administration of Justice Stream, and Director of the Mooting Program.

Professor Walker is the author of Castel and Walker: Canadian Conflict of Laws, and the Halsbury’s Laws of Canada volume on the Conflict of Laws; she is the General Editor of The Civil Litigation Process, and of Class Actions in Canada, and co-editor of Common Law, Civil Law and the Future of Categories. She is also a co-author of Irwin Essentials: Civil Procedure, Private International Law in Common Law Canada, and A Practical Guide to Mooting.

Professor Walker has lectured in Wuhan and Xi’an, and she has taught Conflict of Laws as a visitor at Monash, University of Haifa and University of Toronto, as a Hauser Global Visiting Professor at NYU in New York and in its joint program with NUS in Singapore, and at Monash University’s Prato Campus. She taught comparative procedure as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford, and advocacy at University of Zagreb’s Zadar Program, and for the past thirteen years, she has taught private international law as a Foreign Research Professor at Tunis II, where she has also led the International Lawyers for Africa Tunisian National Committee. Professor Walker has led the Osgoode summer program at Hebrew University of Jerusalem on five occasions, and served as faculty advisor to the Osgoode Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot for the past thirteen years and the Tunis team for four years.

Professor Walker has lectured at The Hague Academy of International Law Summer Program and co-chaired the 72nd Biennial Conference of the International Law Association and the International Association of Procedural Law’s Toronto Conference; and she led the Project on Teaching Procedure, which produced the OHLJ Special Issue on Teaching Procedure.

Professor Walker has served as an International Advisor to the American Law Institute in its project with Unidroit to develop Principles and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure; and as a member of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada Committee on National Class Actions, of the IBA Task Force on Guidelines on Recognition and Enforcement of Collective Redress Judgments, of the ILA Committee on International Civil Litigation, the ABA Canada/US Class Working Group on Protocols for Parallel Class Actions and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada’s Project on Uniform International Arbitration Legislation. She has served as President of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association, Chair of the Toronto Chapter of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and she is Secretary General of the International Association of Procedural Law. Professor Walker was the Law Commission of Ontario’s first Scholar in Residence, she has been the Common Law Advisor to the Federal Courts Rules Committee since 2006, and she is currently serving as Academic Advisor to the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Professor Walker is a member of the American Law Institute and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. She is a member of the University Club of Toronto, the Athenaeum Club in London.

Professor Walker has served as an ICC and ICDR arbitrator in various matters and she consults and serves as expert in matters of international litigation and arbitration and complex litigation. She is a member of the panel of foreign arbitrators of the ICDR, CIETAC, SHIAC, KLRCA and a member arbitrator of Arbitration Place, Toronto, and Outer Temple Chambers, London.

Research Interests: International Litigation and Arbitration, Comparative Procedure, Advocacy.

Rehaag, Sean

Professor Sean Rehaag is the Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies and the Director of the Refugee Law Laboratory. He specializes in immigration and refugee law, administrative law, legal process, access to justice, and new legal technologies. He frequently contributes to public debates about immigration and refugee law, and he engages in law reform efforts in these areas. He is also committed to exploring innovative teaching methodologies, with a particular interest in clinical and experiential education. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services.

Professor Rehaag’s interdisciplinary academic research focuses on empirical studies of immigration and refugee law decision-making processes. He currently holds an SSHRC grant involving new legal technologies, artificial intelligence and quantitative research on Canadian refugee adjudication. He is also pursuing research using experiments to better understand how refugee adjudicators make credibility assessments. In 2013, he received the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “Judicial Review of Refugee Determinations: The Luck of the Draw?”. He publishes yearly statistics on Canada’s refugee determination system. Many of his publications are available open-access on SSRN.

Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty in 2008, Professor Rehaag was a visiting scholar at the Université de Montreal’s Chaire de recherche du Canada en droit international des migrations. He has also been a visiting scholar with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at UC Hastings, a visiting researcher at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and an instructor at the University of Victoria and the Université de Sherbrooke. He holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto, bachelor’s degrees in civil law and common law from McGill University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of British Columbia.

Research Interests: Immigration and Refugee Law, Empirical Legal Studies, Judicial/Administrative Decision-Making, New Legal Technologies, Legal Process, Access to Justice, Gender and Sexuality

Mosher, Janet

Professor Mosher joined the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School in 2001 after teaching at the Faculties of Law and Social Work at the University of Toronto, where she was also the Director of the Combined LLB/MSW program. Between 2001 to 2005 and 2011 to 2013 she was the Academic Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services. She is the co-founder of the Feminist Advocacy: Ending Violence Against Women Clinical Program and has served on many occasions as the program’s co-director. Professor Mosher has served as the editor-in-chief of Osgoode’s Journal of Law and Social Policy, as the English language editor of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and on the boards of several community-based social justice organizations.

Research Interests: Gender-based violence and legal interventions, access to justice for marginalized populations, welfare policy, poverty law, homelessness, legal aid, and clinical legal education

Teaching Areas: Feminist Advocacy: Ending Violence Against Women, Legal Process, Law & Poverty, Legal Ethics.

Recent Publications:
Domestic Violence and Access to Justice: A Mapping of Relevant Laws, Polices and Justice System Components Across Canada, co-authored ebook (CanLii)

“Domestic Violence, Precarious Immigration Status, and the Complex Interplay of Family Law and Immigration Law” (2023) 35:1 Canadian Journal of Family Law 297-358

“Introduction: Domestic Violence and Access to Justice within the Family Law and Intersection Legal Systems,” co-authored, (2023) 35:1 Canadian Journal of Family Law 1-32

“A Comparison of Gender-Based Violence Laws in Canada: A Report for the National Action Plan on Gender-Based Violence Working Group on Responsive Legal and Justice Systems,” commissioned by Women’s Shelters Canada for the Roadmap for the National Action Plan on Violence Against Women and Gender-Based Violence report (appendix F), co-authored, 30 April 2021

“COVID-19, the Shadow Pandemic, and Access to Justice for Survivors of Domestic Violence,” co-authored, (2020) 57:3 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 739-799

“The Costs of Justice in Domestic Violence Cases – Mapping Canadian Law and Policy,” co-authored, in Trevor CW Farrow & Lesley A Jacobs, eds, The Justice Crisis: The Cost and Value of Accessing Law (UBC Press, 2020) 149-172; version with extended footnotes on SSRN at

“Introduction” to “Reimagining Child Welfare,” a special volume of the Journal of Law and Social Policy, co-authored (2018) 28 JLSP

“Grounding Access to Justice Theory and Practice in the Experiences of Women Abused by Their Intimate Partners,” (2015) 32:2 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 149-176

“Accessing Justice Amid Threats of Contagion,” (2014) 51:3 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 919-56 (refereed), reprinted in Kristy Buccieri and Rebecca Schiff, eds, Pandemic preparedness & homelessness: lessons from H1N1 in Canada (Toronto, ON : Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, 2016)

“From Research to Action: Four theories and their implications for knowledge mobilization,” (2014) 5:4 Scholarly and Research Communication 1-17 (lead author with Uzo Anucha, Henry Appiah & Sue Levesque) (refereed)

Graduate Research Supervision (LLM, PhD): Professor Mosher is particularly interested in supervising projects related to how law is implicated in gender-based violence; community-grounded conceptions of access to justice; law and social change; and poverty law. She welcomes qualitative projects, including those deploying community-based participatory action methodologies. Her current research grants include domestic violence and access to justice at the intersections of various areas of law and legal processes (family, child welfare, criminal, immigration, etc.) and the criminalization of women victims of domestic violence.

Professor Mosher is willing to read preliminary proposals from strong students in the areas of interest listed, and comment on interest in supervision prior to submission of an official application.

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

Imai, Shin

After he became a lawyer in 1980, Shin Imai practised at Keewaytinok Native Legal Services in Moosonee and later had his own practice in the areas of human rights, refugee law and indigenous rights. He joined the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General in 1989 to work on the development of Alternative Dispute Resolution programs and to initiate justice projects in indigenous communities.

He was appointed to faculty at Osgoode in 1996 and is currently a director of the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project. He has served as Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services, the Director of the Intensive Program on Aboriginal Lands, Resources and Governments, Director of Clinical Education, and Co-director of the Latin American Network on Research and Education in Human Rights (RedLEIDH).

Imai was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award at the Law School in 2004 and 2007, and the University-wide Teaching Award in 2010.

Hutchinson, Allan C.

A member of Osgoode’s faculty since 1982, Professor Allan Hutchinson served as Associate Dean from 1994 to 1996 and later, in 2003, he was named Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and External Relations). Professor Hutchinson is a legal theorist with an international reputation for his original and provocative writings. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and named a Distinguished Research Professor by York University in 2006.  His research interests are law and politics; legal theory; the legal profession; constitutional law; torts; jurisprudence; civil procedure; and racism and law. As well as publishing in most of the common-law world’s leading law journals, he has written or edited many books. Much of his work has been devoted to examining the failure of law to live up to its democratic promise. His latest publications are Evolution and the Common Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Companies We Keep: Corporate Governance for a Democratic Society (Irwin Law, 2006). In 2007, he received the University-wide Teaching Award and was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.

Research Interests: Public Law, Legal Profession, Legal Theory

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

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