Type: Emeritus Faculty

McNeil, Kent

Kent McNeil is an Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he taught from 1987 to 2016.  His research focuses on the rights of Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.  In 2007, he received a Killam Fellowship to pursue this research. In 2019, he was the Law Foundation of Saskatchewan H. Robert Arscott Chair at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, his alma mater.

In addition to his academic work, Professor McNeil has acted as a consultant for numerous Indigenous organizations and has been an expert witness in court cases in Canada and Belize. He is currently working on sovereignty issues in relation to the European colonization of North America and the development of international law in this context.  He will be pursuing this research as a Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in International Area Studies at Yale University in 2021-22.

McCamus, John D.

John D. McCamus has been a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1971.  Prior to his faculty appointment, he served as Law Clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice Laskin of the Supreme Court of Canada.  He teaches Contract, Commercial and Consumer Transactions, Contract Remedies, and Restitution. Professor McCamus is the author of The Law of Contracts, The Law of Restitution, editor of Freedom of Information: Canadian Perspectives, and co-editor of National Security:  Surveillance and Accountability in a Democratic Society, and Cases and Materials on Contracts, 3d ed.  Additionally, he has written several articles covering various aspects of the law of restitution, contracts, freedom of information, and the protection of privacy.  He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Restatement of Restitution 3d.  Professor McCamus has a notable history of contribution to law reform efforts.  He has produced a number of research monographs for the Ontario Law Reform Commission and served as its Chair from 1992 to 1996.  In 1996-97, he chaired the Ontario Legal Aid Review.  Professor McCamus served as Dean of the Law School from 1982 to 1987.  His academic service also includes former positions as Assistant and Associate Dean, and Director of Osgoode Hall Law School’s Graduate Program.

Johnson, Tom

A member of the Osgoode Hall Law School faculty since 1987, Professor Tom Johnson has served as Co-Director of the Schulich and Osgoode joint JD/MBA Program, Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Business Law, Director of the Osgoode Business Clinic, and Co-Director of Osgoode’s LLM Program in Bankruptcy and Insolvency.

Professor Johnson’s areas of teaching include contract law, commercial law (secured transactions, bankruptcy and insolvency, capital market regulation and international business transactions), international development and project finance.  He is a recipient of the Osgoode Teaching Excellence Award.

Professor Johnson has more than 25 years of experience as a consultant to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, working on access to finance and land tenure reform projects in developing countries.  In that role he has advised governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

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.

Hay, Douglas C.

Professor Emeritus Douglas Hay was cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and York’s Department of History in 1981, teaching the comparative history of criminal procedure, punishment, and crime, and the history of private law in the common law world. He was co- director of an international project on the evolution of the contract of employment: Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (2004) and other titles, most recently ‘Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour and Law in Industrialization’ in Law With Class: Essays Inspired by the Work of Harry Glasbeek (2019) and ‘The Master and Servant Statute of 1823: Enlarging the Powers of Justices Act’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 43 (2022), 3-23.

Other work includes the English high court’s criminal jurisdiction (Criminal Cases on the Crown Side of King’s Bench 1740-1800 (2010); ‘Hanging and the English Judges: The Judicial Politics of Retention and Abolition,’ in America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (2010); D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, E.P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (2nd edition, with new introductions, 2011); ‘E.P. Thompson and the Rule of Law: Qualifying the Unqualified Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (2021), 202-220; and the ‘Preface’ to the concluding volume of Canadian State Trials, vol.5 (2022).
Professor Hay is presently writing about the administration of the criminal law in Georgian England, the role of the judiciary in King’s Bench, and the comparative history of criminal procedure in the British Empire. He has published books and articles on the history of English and Quebec criminal law; history of criminal procedure; social history of crime; judicial biography; courts and their political significance; and the history of employment law. He has been a visitor at Yale, Warwick, and Columbia law schools, and has been on the boards of the Canadian Historical Review, Law and History Review, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society for Legal History. He has given the Chorley Lecture (London School of Economics), the Iredell Lecture in Legal History (University of Lancaster), The Hugh Alan Maclean Lecture (University of Victoria Faculty of Law), the Weir Memorial Lecture (University of Alberta School of Law), the Annual Lecture for the American Society of Legal History, the Hugh Fitzpatrick Lecture in Legal Bibliography (Dublin), and the Richard Youard Lecture in Legal History (Oxford University). He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History in 2013, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Social Sciences) in 2016.

Girard, Philip

Philip Girard joined the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School on July 1, 2013. He had previously visited Osgoode as the James Lewtas Visiting Professor in 1993-94 and 2011-12. Professor Girard is one of Canada’s most distinguished legal academics and legal historians. In 2011, he was made an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the first Canadian to be so recognized, and in 2021 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Prior to joining Osgoode, he was University Research Professor, and Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies at Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University.  At Dalhousie, he served as the Law School’s Acting Dean, 1991-93, and Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Research), 2002-06. In 2010-11 and 2017-18, he was Visiting Scholar, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto. He enjoys a richly deserved reputation for collegial and professional service including service as Chair, Law, Criminology & Socio-legal Studies Adjudication Committee, Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2008-11, and President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers, 2003-04.

His current work is a co-authored (with Jim Phillips and Blake Brown) three-volume History of Law in Canada. This is the first synoptic overview of the history of law in Canada, one that includes Indigenous law, civil law, and common law. Vol. I, beginnings to 1866 (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2018) received a Walter Owen Prize from the Foundation for Legal Research and honourable mention for the Wesley Pue Canadian Law and Society Association Prize. Vol. II, Law for the New Dominion (1867-1914) appeared in 2022 and won the Wesley Pue Canadian Law and Society Association Prize, while vol. III (1914-2000) is expected to appear in 2026. Other publications include Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society,  2011), winner of the Clio-Atlantic Prize awarded by the Canadian Historical Association; and Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2005), for which Prof. Girard was awarded the  Champlain Society’s Floyd S. Chalmers Award 2006, for best book published on Ontario history in previous year, and shortlisted for the John A. Macdonald Prize 2006, for best book published on Canadian history in 2005.

He is also editor (with Jim Phillips) of two collections on Nova Scotia legal history: The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754-2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle  (2004), and Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume III, Nova Scotia (1990), both published by the University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society. Professor Girard is the author of numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters, and is Associate Editor of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

Gilmour, Joan M.

Professor Gilmour joined Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty in 1990, after practising civil litigation and administrative law.  She teaches Health Law, Legal Governance of Health Care, Torts, and Disability and the Law in the JD program. She developed and is the founding Director of Osgoode’s part-time LLM program specializing in Health Law, and teaches graduate courses on Professional Governance, and Legal Frameworks of the Canadian Healthcare System.  She is past Director of Osgoode’s Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, and past Acting and Associate Director of York University’s Centre for Health Studies. Professor Gilmour’s research and publications in health law span some of the most debated issues in contemporary society.  She completed a major study on the effects of tort law (negligence) on efforts to improve patient safety and reduce medical error.  Other research projects include an examination of the legal and ethical issues in decision-making about health care for children, and a study of the interrelationship of disability, gender, law and inequality.  She served as a member of the Expert Panel convened by the Council of Canadian Academies on medical assistance in dying, has acted as a consultant to Health Canada, and completed a study for the Ontario Law Reform Commission on assisted suicide, euthanasia, and foregoing life-sustaining treatment.  She has also completed studies on health care restructuring and privatization, professional regulation of complementary and alternative medicine, and the interrelation of poverty, health and access to justice.

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

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

Davis, John N.

Professor John Davis joined the Osgoode faculty in 2000, and teaches Intensive Legal Research and Writing.  He is a co-author of the Legal Research Handbook, 5th ed. (2003), and the author of “The Digital Storage, Retrieval and Transmission of Case Reports in Canada: A Brief History”, in Law Reporting and Legal Publishing in Canada: A History (1997).  He was the Law Librarian from 2000 to 2005.  From 1987 to 2000, he was an Associate Professor and the Law Librarian at the University of Victoria.  From 1981 to 1987, he was the reference librarian and a sessional lecturer at the University of Manitoba.  He also practised law for a time in Cayuga, Ontario.  His pre-law studies were in computer science.  Professor Davis’ research interests include conveyancing law; the law of remedies, legal, constitutional, and first nations history; administrative law; legal language and interpretation; information technology law; and copyright.

Research Interests: Public Law