Type: Faculty

Sangiuliano, Anthony

Anthony Sangiuliano joined Osgoode Hall Law School as an Assistant Professor in 2025. He is a lawyer, legal scholar, and philosopher. His areas of research and teaching include moral, political, and legal philosophy, equality and antidiscrimination law, constitutional and administrative law, tort law, and health law and bioethics. His is a Co-Director of Osgoode’s JD/MA in Philosophy Joint Program.

Professor Sangiuliano holds a JD from Osgoode, where he was awarded the Dean’s Gold Key upon graduation, and a PhD from the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where he was a Canadian Bar Association Viscount Bennett Fellow and a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar. Before joining Osgoode, he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law as well as a York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellow. He has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto and at Osgoode, where he was nominated for an Adjunct Teaching Award.

Professor Sangiuliano has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, including the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, the Supreme Court Law Review, the Journal of Legal Philosophy, Law and Philosophy, the University of Toronto Law Journal, the McGill Law Journal, the University of British Columbia Law Review, the American Journal of Law and Equality, the Review of Constitutional Studies, Global Constitutionalism, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. His writing has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. He has also worked as a Research Associate at a private litigation firm in Toronto, as counsel for the Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario and the Commissioner of the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry, and as a law clerk for the judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal and Justice Russell Brown of the Supreme Court of Canada. He regularly provides consulting services for interventions before the Supreme Court.

Research Interests: Moral, political, and legal philosophy, equality and antidiscrimination law, constitutional and administrative law, tort law, and health law and bioethics.

Petrin, Martin

Martin Petrin is the Jarislowsky Dimma Mooney Chair in Corporate Governance at York University, with a joint appointment at Osgoode Hall Law School and the Schulich School of Business. He was the inaugural Dancap Private Equity Chair in Corporate Governance at Western University and previously served as the Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitor at the National University of Singapore, a Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor at Notre Dame London, a Visiting Professor at NYU London, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private Law. Martin has practiced law at a leading international business law firm and is admitted to the Bar in New York and Switzerland.

Research Interests: Corporate law and governance, including the impacts of AI and new technologies

Cossette-Lefebvre, Étienne

Étienne Cossette-Lefebvre is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, and an incoming Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at Osgoode Hall Law School. He feels privileged to be a Collaborator at the Observatory on Human Rights at the UN. During his doctoral studies, Étienne was a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholar in Honour of Nelson Mandela (2021-2024). He was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Fellow in Property Law at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law, where he taught Property Law, and a course lecturer at McGill University, Faculty of Law, where he taught the Law of Trusts. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he was the Assistant Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law (2020-2021). Before his graduate studies in law, Étienne clerked at the Court of Appeal of Québec (2015-2018), and for Justice Russell Brown at the Supreme Court of Canada (2018-2019). His research interests include the law of property, the law of persons, the law of privacy, the law of obligations, the law of successions, comparative law, legal theory and philosophy, and legal history. His work on comparative law has already been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada (6362222 Canada inc. v Prelco, 2021 SCC 39, para. 46, 48, 61, 63, 70, 78, 80).

Research Interests: the law of property, the law of persons, the law of privacy, the law of obligations, the law of successions, comparative law, legal theory and philosophy, and legal history.

Arthurs, Harry

University Professor, former Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School (1972-77) and President of York University (1985-92), Harry Arthurs has also been an academic visitor at several Canadian, British and Commonwealth universities.

Arthurs’ publications range widely over the areas of legal education and the legal profession, legal history and legal theory, labour and administrative law, globalization and constitutionalism. His academic contributions have been recognized by his election as an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.  He was awarded the Canada Council’s Killam Prize for his lifetime contributions to the social sciences (2002), the Bora Laskin Prize for his contributions to labour law (2003) and the International Labour Organization’s Decent Work Research Prize (jointly with Joseph Stiglitz) (2008).

Arthurs has been an arbitrator and mediator in labour disputes, has conducted inquiries and reviews at Canadian and American universities, and has provided advice to governments on a number of issues ranging from higher education policy to the constitution to labour and employment law.  Recently, he has chaired reviews of Canada’s labour standards legislation (2004-2006), Ontario’s pension legislation (2006-2008) and the funding of Ontario’s workplace safety and insurance system (2010-2012).  He has also served as a Bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada, member of the Economic Council of Canada and President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Oppong, Richard Frimpong

Professor Richard Frimpong Oppong joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2024. He has taught in the USA and UK and at Thompson Rivers University. He completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia and Post-doctoral studies at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. He holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School, a first-class Master of Laws degree in Commercial Law from the University of Cambridge, and a first-class Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Ghana. He was called to the Ghana Bar in October 2003 after completing the professional law course at the Ghana School of Law with distinction. He received the John Mensah Sarbah Certificate of Honour and the Charles Mensah-Cann Memorial Prize awarded to the best graduating student there.

Professor Oppong is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He was a member of the Working Group of The Hague Conference on Private International Law that drafted The Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts, 2015. The Curatorium of The Hague Academy of International Law has selected him to deliver a special Course, comprising five magisterial lectures, during the private international law session in the summer of 2026. Before this, he served as the Director of Studies at The Hague Academy of International Law during the private international law session in the summer of 2012. He is the Program Advisor to the Tanzanian-German Centre for Eastern African Legal Studies which offers LLM and PhD programs on East African integration.

Professor Oppong maintains research and teaching interests in private international law, international arbitration, contract law, domestic and international sale of goods law, and regional trade and economic integration in Africa. He has published widely and made outstanding contributions to advancing the law with his scholarship. He has published eight books (comprising four sole-authored books, two co-authored books and two co-edited books) and over 55 articles, book chapters, and book reviews.

Professor Oppong’s internationally excellent research outputs have been variously described by independent reviewers in book reviews as “tackling a major problem of long-term interest”; “offering innovative insights”; “a remarkable tour de force”; “ambitious and methodologically executed”; “clear and authoritative”; “instructive, illuminating, lucid, thoroughly researched”; “clear, accessible, informed and informative”; and as of “practical value” and of “exceptional quality”. Two of his publications have won international awards: the 2013 American Society of International Law Prize in Private International Law and the 2014 James Crawford Prize of the Journal of International Dispute Settlement. In 2011, he was nominated for the prestigious Hessel Yntema Prize of the American Journal of Comparative Law. Some of his books and journal articles have been translated into French and Chinese. He is frequently cited in academic publications and judicial decisions.

Professor Oppong’s research has been funded by external funding from funding bodies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Killam Trusts, the Foundation for Legal Research in Canada and the British Academy,

Professor Oppong has been invited to peer-reviewed articles and books for more than 20 journals and publishers. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Yearbook of Private International Law and the Journal of Private International Law. He is an Assistant Editor of the Global Journal of Comparative Law.

Research Interests:  Private International Law, International Arbitration, Contract Law, International and Domestic Sale of Goods Law, and Regional Economic Integration in Africa.

On leave for the current academic year.

Ahmad, Hassan M.

Professor Hassan M. Ahmad is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School where he researches and teaches on topics related to corporate governance, business and human rights, transnational law, tort law, international law and climate change litigation. Prior to joining Osgoode Hall, Professor Ahmad was an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He also served as a full-time Replacement Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law (Common Law Section). He holds an SJD from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, an LLM from the University of California, Berkeley, and a JD from Osgoode Hall. During his doctorate, he was a visiting scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge. Prior to entering academia, Professor Ahmad worked at the International Criminal Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and as a private practice civil and class actions litigator in Toronto.

Professor Ahmad’s research has been recognized by a number of prestigious scholarly organizations, including the American Society of International Law and the American Society of Comparative Law. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Litigating Business and Human Rights Violations: Themes, Perspectives, and Prospects (Cambridge, University Press, forthcoming). His work has also appeared in leading Canadian and foreign journals such as the American Journal of International Law, The American Journal of Comparative Law, Berkeley Journal of International Law, UBC Law Review, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Queen’s Law Journal, and Transnational Legal Theory, among several others. He has also published several book chapters in edited volumes. His research has been funded by, among others, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Law Foundation of British Columbia, the Hampton Fund at UBC, and the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research.

At the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Professor Ahmad won teaching awards for in-person and online teaching as well as for his mentorship of JD and graduate students. Outside of his academic work, he has continued to be involved in public interest litigation, representing clients at the Supreme Court of Canada, the Ontario Court of Appeal, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Otherwise, Professor Ahmad lends his expertise regularly to media outlets. His commentary on high profile civil cases, issues of corporate accountability, and climate change has appeared in, for instance, The Globe and Mail, CBC News, CTV News, The Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, and the Winnipeg Free Press, among others.

Research Interests:  Torts, Corporate Governance, Business and Human Rights, Climate Change Litigation, Administrative Law, Civil Procedure, International Law, Transnational Law, Class Actions, Colonial Legal History, Islamic Law

Cameron, Jamie

Jamie Cameron, who is now Professor Emerita, was a member of the faculty (1984-2020) and a full professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her degrees are: B.A. (UBC 1975), LL.B. (McGill University 1978), LL.M. (Columbia University 1983), and MA (art history, York University 2024). Professor Cameron was a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada for the Hon. Justice Brian Dickson (1978-79) and was on the faculty at Cornell Law School before joining Osgoode in 1984.

Professor Cameron is one of Canada’s senior constitutional scholars, whose scholarship and teaching focused on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of expression and the press, the Supreme Court of Canada, criminal law, American constitutional law, and judicial biography. Her scholarship can be found at the Osgoode Digital Commons and on her SSRN page. Professor Cameron has been on the Board of Editors for Ontario Reports for over thirty years, was editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Hall Law Journal and edited or co-edited a dozen book collections. Over the years she chaired and co-chaired many conferences and events. Professor Cameron was appointed to two review boards, which exercise jurisdiction over mentally disordered criminal offenders under Part XX.1 of the Criminal Code (Ontario Review Board (2013-2022); Nunavut Review Board (2018-present)).

Professor Cameron was a longtime Director and Vice-President of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, was a member of the Board of Directors for the BC Civil Liberties Association and is currently a member of CCLA’s National Council. She is on the Advisory Board and Academic Freedom Committee for the Centre for Free Expression (Toronto Metropolitan University). Professor Cameron represented the CCLA and the Centre for Free Expression in several Charter cases at the Supreme Court of Canada. Her cultural activities include the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Board of Trustees, 2004-2012, and vice-chair, 2011-13); Canada’s National Ballet School (Board of Directors, 2011-2014); Inuit Art Foundation (Board of Directors, 2016-2022); Art Canada Institute (Board of Directors, 2019-2024); and Artworks for Cancer (Board of Directors, 2021-present).

McMahon, Patricia

Professor Patricia McMahon’s areas of teaching and research are civil procedure, law and equity and legal history broadly defined. She is also the Director and Lead Interviewer of the Oral History Program at the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the Co-Academic Director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution. She joined the faculty in July 2022 after a number of years in private practice.

Professor McMahon holds a BA in history from Huron University College at Western University and an MA in history from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her work on how protest movements influenced Canada’s nuclear policy from 1957 to 1963, the subject of her PhD in Canadian diplomatic and political history from the University of Toronto. This was followed by an LLB (with honours) from the University of Toronto, where she served as co-editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review and received the Dean Cecil A. Wright Key. Following a clerkship with the Honorable Justice Ian Binnie at the Supreme Court of Canada, she attended Yale Law School as a Fulbright Fellow, where she completed an LLM and JSD. Her dissertation dealt with the influence of law reform movements on the procedural fusion of law and equity in Victorian England, which led to the Judicature Acts and modern conceptions of civil procedure.  At Yale, she was also a student director in a clinic engaged in civil liberties litigation related to the policies of the U.S. government following the attacks of September 11, 2001. This included cases involving detentions, search and seizure, due process, international human rights and humanitarian law. From 2004 to 2008, she served as a regional representative for the executive committee of Yale Law School.

While in private practice, Professor McMahon focused on complex litigation, including class actions, public law and tax litigation. She appeared before all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada.

Professor McMahon has published widely on aspects of legal history, access to information, the fusion of law and equity and equitable procedure, including two books. The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood (with Robert J. Sharpe) was published jointly by the University of Toronto Press and Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History in 2007. The book was the members’ selection for that year, won the Canadian Law and Society Association Book Prize and was short-listed for the John Wesley Dafoe Book Prize. Essence of Indecision: Diefenbaker’s Nuclear Policy 1957-1963 was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2009 and is considered the leading text on the topic. She is currently working on three manuscripts: one related to the history of the fusion of law and equity, another with co-author Robert Bothwell on a multi-million-dollar fraud that involved the Canadian company that supplied uranium to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, and a third involving the judicial treatment of a series of landmark constitutional cases in the 1930s known as the “Bennett New Deal.”

Professor McMahon’s work with the Osgoode Society involves overseeing the oral history collection, which is the largest collection of its kind in the world.  She is also the lead interviewer and regularly conducts interviews with lawyers and judges about their contributions to the legal profession.

Research Interests: civil procedure; legal process; the impact of COVID-19 on the courts and the legal profession; lawyers in public life; law reform (both modern and historical); the fusion of law and equity; equitable procedure; and legal history broadly defined, including legal biography.

 

Choudhury, Barnali

Barnali Choudhury is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Prior to joining Osgoode, she was a Professor at University College London and academic director of UCL’s Global Governance Institute.

She is an internationally recognized expert on business and international economic issues, particularly as they relate to issues of human rights. She has published numerous books, including The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Edward Elgar, 2023); Corporate Duties to the Public (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Understanding the Company: Corporate Governance and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Public Services and International Trade Liberalization: Human Rights and Gender Implications (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Berkeley Business Law Journal, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, Journal of Corporate Law Studies, as well as in numerous other journals and in book chapters. It has also been featured in the Oxford Business Law Blog, the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog and the American Society of International Law Insight, among others. She has written op-eds for the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, and iPolitics and her work has been featured on the CBC and in Bloomberg Businessweek. She has held numerous research grants including grants from the Leverhulme Trust and SSHRC.

She is regularly invited to give talks and has presented her work throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and at the United Nations. She has visited at New York University, University of Cambridge, National University of Singapore, University of St. Gallen, University of Otago, and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private Law. In addition to numerous academic citations, her work has been cited by the United Nations, the UK’s House of Commons, the House of Lords EU Select Committee, international arbitral tribunals and relied on by governments and international non-governmental organizations.

In addition, she is an Advisory Member for the Academic Circle Supporting the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development, on the board of directors for Ecojustice Canada, a principal co-investigator for the Canada Climate Law Initiative, a co-director of Osgoode Professional Development’s LLM in International Business Law, an Editorial Board Member of the Business and Human Rights Journal and is appointed to the pool of candidates for the EU’s Trade and Sustainable Development Panel.

For her latest research visit her SSRN page.

Research Interests:  Corporate Law, Business & Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsibility, International Investment Law, Corporate Governance, International Trade Law, International Arbitration

Akande, Rabiat

Professor Rabiat Akande works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society. Her research explores law’s interplay with global inequality. She investigates this relationship in the historical setting of Europe’s nineteenth and twentieth-century empire, especially in its encounter with Africa and the Muslim World. Her work further grapples with the afterlife of that encounter for law, unveiling legacies that resound far beyond erstwhile colonies.

In her recent book, Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Akande investigates the case of the British imperial encounter in Colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, the book chronicles contestations between British colonial officials, Christian missionaries, and indigenous Muslim elites over law’s governance religious difference, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of those struggles. The book illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues–the relationship between religion, the state, and society–while also spotlighting law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change.

Beyond Entangled Domains, Dr. Akande’s work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law (forthcoming), the Law and History Review, the Journal of Law and Religion, the Supreme Court Law Review, Die Welt des Islam (forthcoming), and in co-edited volumes published by or forthcoming with the Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, University of Toronto Press, and the University of Virginia Press. Dr. Akande is currently at work on “Malcolm X, Black Globalism, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism,” a book project that investigates the globalist critique of imperialism that was central to Malcolm X’s thought in his last years and inspired by his visits to Africa and the Muslim World. She is also at work on a volume interrogating histories of the idea of the “international” in pre-colonial Africa.

Dr. Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha with the support of the African Union and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among other institutions. Before Osgoode Hall Law School, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies as an Academy Scholar from 2019-2021. She received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation, “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. At Harvard University, Dr. Akande held the Clark Byse fellowship at the Law School and was a Dissertation Fellow and Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She also served on the editorial board of the Harvard International Law Journal. Dr Akande taught courses at Harvard in the Law School and the Department for African and African American Studies. She also taught at Northeastern University School of Law. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Akande obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with First Class Honors and at the top of her class. She later studied at the Nigerian Law School, from which she also graduated with First Class Honors.

Dr. Akande’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants, including from the US National Science Foundation (as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Cravath International Research fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others. She serves on the International Journal of Law in Context editorial board. She is the co-chair of the American Society of International Law’s Africa Interest Group. She is also active in the American Society for Legal History, the Law and Society Association, and the African Studies Association.

Research Interests:  legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law and the global south, and (post)colonial African law and society.