Professor Sonia Lawrence joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2001. She graduated from the University of Toronto’s joint LLB/MSW program, went on to serve as law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada, and pursued graduate work at Yale Law School. Her work centers on critical analyses of legal conception of equality.
Sonia has served in a number of administrative roles at Osgoode including Assistant Dean of First Year and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. Her current teaching includes a first year public and constitutional law, a seminar in critical race theory, and serving as the academic director/instructor for Feminist Advocacy, a clinical legal education opportunity offered in partnership with the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto. In the past she has served as the academic director for Osgoode’s Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (offered in partnership with the Human Rights Legal Support Centre (Ontario), and taught seminars in gender equality, graduate research and research methods, among others. Sonia is serving two terms as the President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers / Association Canadienne des Professeurs de Droit.
Research Interests: Public Law, Gender, Race, Critical Race Feminism, Feminism, Equality Law, Charter of Rights and Freedoms
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
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
Andrée Boisselle’s research interests are in the areas of indigenous law, comparative and constitutional law, pluralism and postcolonial legal theory. She is currently completing her doctorate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. Her doctoral research on Stó:lõ constitutionalism and the Coast Salish legal tradition has been supported by scholarships from the Trudeau Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her master’s thesis critically examined the development of the duty to consult First Nations in Canadian law. It received the Quebec Association of Law Professors Prize in 2008. Before pursuing graduate studies, she practised litigation in Québec with McCarthy Tétrault LLP and did contractual work with the Supreme Court of Canada.
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