Expertise: Legal Theory

Ozai, Ivan

Ivan Ozai researches and teaches national and international tax law and policy, with a particular focus on the intersection of tax law with legal theory and political philosophy.

His academic writing has appeared in various law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, such as the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, the Fordham International Law Journal, the Dalhousie Law Journal, the World Tax Journal, the Canadian Tax Journal, and the Journal of Tax Studies. He is the author of Expenditures in the Value-Added Tax (2019), published in Portuguese by Editora Lumen Juris, and has participated in several edited volumes, including Tax Justice and Tax Law: Understanding Unfairness in Tax Systems (Hart Publishing, 2020).

Professor Ozai has been the recipient of multiple awards for his scholarly work, including the IFA USA Writing Award (2018) by the International Fiscal Association and the Paul-Gérin-Lajoie Rising Star Award (2019) by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC). His recent work was shortlisted for the Frans Vanistendael Award (2023) by the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation.

Before moving into academia, he practised tax for more than ten years as a litigator, legal adviser, and chartered professional accountant. In Brazil, he was appointed a tax court judge and held several senior government positions, including as the Director-General of the Advance Tax Rulings Directorate of the Department of Finance of the State of Sao Paulo.

Professor Ozai was awarded the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2023. He currently sits on the editorial board and serves as a reviewer for several journals and book publishers in law and philosophy. He is also a board member of the YIN Steering Committee (Canada) of the International Fiscal Association. During his doctoral studies at McGill University Faculty of Law, where he was a Richard H. Tomlinson fellow, he was a visiting scholar at the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD) in Amsterdam, the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de Montréal (CÉRIUM), and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo, Ontario.

Research Interests: National, International and Comparative Tax Law; Fiscal Policy; Fiscal Federalism; Statutory Interpretation; Deontic Logic; Jurisprudence

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.

Sutherland, Kate

Professor Kate Sutherland joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1998, and has taught law at the University of Saskatchewan. She was Osgoode’s Assistant Dean, First Year from July 1, 2012 to July 1, 2015.  She has served as law clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as Chief Justice E. D. Bayda of the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan. Professor Sutherland is former Acting Director of the Centre for Constitutional Studies at the University of Alberta. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1995 and the Law Society of Saskatchewan Gold Medal in 1989.  Professor Sutherland has written and presented in areas such as charter equality rights, sexual harassment, childhood sexual abuse, and tort law. She has served as editor or co-editor of several publications, including Review of Constitutional Studies, Constitutional Forum, Points of View, and Saskatchewan Law Review . Professor Sutherland has also written several literary pieces, including “The Necklace” in The New Quarterly , Winter (1997), Summer Reading: A Collection of Short Fiction (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1995), and “Lucia” in Prairie Fire (1992).  Professor Sutherland’s community involvement has included her work for the Boston AIDS Care Project, University of Saskatchewan Women’s Centre, Her Story Calendar Collective, Saskatchewan Action Committee on the Status of Women, and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild.

Research Interests: Legal Theory, Feminist Legal Studies

Slattery, Brian

Professor Brian Slattery joined Osgoode Hall Law School in 1981, having previously held positions at the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and McGill University.

Known for his foundational work on Aboriginal rights and constitutional theory, Professor Slattery has devoted much of his scholarship to overhauling the standard conception of the Canadian Constitution in a way that takes account of the distinctive rights and historical contributions of Aboriginal peoples.

In other scholarly work, Professor Slattery has explored the philosophical foundations of human rights and the continuing vitality of the natural law tradition. In the 1990s, Professor Slattery served as a senior advisor to the Federal Royal
Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1995 and was named a York University Distinguished Research Professor in 2009.

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

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.

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

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

Buchanan, Ruth

Ruth Buchanan joined Osgoode Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty, Professor Buchanan taught at the law schools of the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. Professor Buchanan also holds an ongoing appointment as a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she teaches in the Melbourne Law Masters program.

Professor Buchanan holds an SJD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an LLB from the University of Victoria and an AB from Princeton University. In 2011, Professor Buchanan founded the Law.Arts.Culture Colloquium, to create a vibrant forum for the discussion of emerging interdisciplinary work on law and humanities. Since that time, Professor Buchanan, through LAC, has hosted more than two dozen speakers, events and installations. She is also a past Director of the Graduate Program (Research), and a past co-Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies.

An interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work spans critical legal theory, sociology of law and cultural legal studies, Dr. Buchanan’s scholarship has engaged with a range of topics including NAFTA and labour rights, the WTO and global constitutionalism, social movements and resistance to globalization, Indigenous law and legal pluralism, law and film. She has published widely and collaborates frequently with legal scholars in Canada and internationally. Professor Buchanan co-edited the collections Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014) with Peer Zumbansen and Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (2012) with Sundhya Pahuja and Stewart Motha. She has published widely, including in the Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities; Miami Law Review; Leiden Journal of International Law; Law,Text,Culture; Journal of Legal Education, Nordic Journal of International Law; Osgoode Hall Law Journal, and the Journal of Law and Society. She has been involved in the editorial boards or editorial advisory boards of the Canadian Journal of Women and Law, Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities, Transnational Legal Theory.

In 2015-16, Professor Buchanan was awarded an Osgoode Hall Research Fellowship for her ongoing project, “Visualizing Developments,” which considers the variety of visual mechanisms through which knowledge about development is produced and disseminated by international institutions. Professor Buchanan is also currently writing a book on International Development with Sundhya Pahuja and Luis Eslava as part of the Routledge-Cavendish Critical Approaches to Law series.

Professor Buchanan has taught courses in the areas of: Globalization and Law, Law and Social Change, Trade, Human Rights and Development, Law and Film. In the Osgoode Graduate Program, she has taught the Legal Research seminar and convened the Study Group on Law in a Global Context. Professor Buchanan has supervised many LLM and doctoral students in the areas of law and development, legal theory, legal sociology, or visual legal studies and law and film.

Research Interests: Law and Development, Legal Theory, Law and Film