Type: Faculty

Patricia McMahon

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 in her fields of study, 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.

In addition, Professor McMahon has published widely on aspects of legal history, access to information, the fusion of law and equity and equitable procedure. She is currently working on two manuscripts: one related to the history of the fusion of law and equity and 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.

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 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), as well as a forthcoming commentary on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. 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 Neue Zurcher Zeitung, and iPolitics and her work has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek. She has held numerous research grants including a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, one of the UK’s most prestigious research bodies.

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, 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.

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 current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues–the relationship between religion, and the state, and society–while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change. These issues are at the forefront of her book, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which traces the emergence of “secularism” as a constitutional idea of ordering religion-state relations in early to mid-twentieth century British Colonial Northern Nigeria, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of that inheritance.

Dr. Akande is an Academy Scholar at Harvard University Academy for International and Area Studies where she was in residence from 2019 to 2021. She graduated 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 as an editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. Dr Akande taught courses at Harvard, both at the Law School, and the Department for African and African American Studies. She also served as adjunct faculty at Northeastern University School of Law. Prior to her graduate work, Dr. Akande was an associate at G. Elias Solicitors and Advocates, Lagos. She obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with a First Class Honors and at the top of her class and later studied at the Nigerian Law School from which she also graduated with a First Class Honors.

Dr. Akande’s work is and has been supported by fellowships and grants including the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US National Science Foundation (as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative), 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 currently leads the African International Legal History Project at the African Institute for International Law.

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

Ozai, Ivan

Professor 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 Journal of Constitutional and International Law, and the Journal of Tax Studies. He has authored chapters in several edited volumes, including, more recently, Tax Justice and Tax Law: Understanding Unfairness in Tax Systems (Hart Publishing, 2020). He is also the author of Expenditures in the Value-Added Tax (2019), published in Portuguese by Editora Lumen Juris.

Professor Ozai has been the recipient of multiple awards for his scholarly work, including the 2018 IFA USA Writing Award by the International Fiscal Association and the 2019 Paul-Gérin-Lajoie Rising Star Award by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Société et Culture (FRQSC). He currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Public Law and serves as a reviewer for several journals in the fields of law and philosophy.

Before joining Osgoode in July 2021, Professor Ozai practised tax for more than ten years as a litigator, a legal adviser, and a chartered professional accountant. He was appointed to several senior government positions in Brazil, including as a tax court judge and the head of the Advance Tax Rulings Directorate of the Department of Finance of the State of Sao Paulo. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Research in Taxation in Sao Paulo.

During his doctoral studies at McGill University Faculty of Law, where he was a Richard H. Tomlinson fellow, Professor Ozai 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

De Stefano, Valerio

Professor Valerio De Stefano, PhD, joined Osgoode as a tenured professor in January 2022 and was then appointed as the inaugural Canada Research in Innovation, Law and Society. From October 2017 to December 2021, he was the BOF-ZAP Research Professor of Labour Law at the Institute for Labour Law and the Faculty of Law of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.

Valerio De Stefano read law at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, where he obtained a master’s degree in 2006 and later received his doctoral degree (2011). At Bocconi University, he served as a postdoctoral researcher between 2011 and 2014 while also being a part-time associate in an international law firm. From 2014 to 2017, he worked as an officer of the International Labour Office in Geneva. During his career, he was a visiting academic at the University College London (UCL), a postdoctoral member of Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge (2013), a Distinguished Speaker for Spring 2018 at the “William C. Wefel Center for Employment Law” at Saint Louis University Law School (2018), and a Senior Fellow (Melbourne Law Masters) at the University of Melbourne (2019).

In 2018, he was awarded an Odysseus Grant from the Research Foundations – Flanders (FWO) amounting to 880,000 Euro for an interdisciplinary research project on the working conditions and labour protection of platform workers. Since 2020 he was also the principal investigator at the KU Leuven of an Horizon2020 Grant about in-work poverty.

Valerio De Stefano regularly publishes articles in major specialized academic journals. In 2016, he was the guest editor of a special issue of the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal on “Crowdsourcing, the Gig-Economy, and the Law”. In 2019, he was the guest editor of a special issue of the same journal on “Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Labour Protection”. He also was the co-editor of a special issue on “Testing the ‘Personal Work’ Relation: New Trade Union Strategies for New Forms of Employment” published by the European Labour Law Journal. In 2022, with professor Antonio Aloisi, he published “Your Boss Is an Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour” (Hart Publishing), a monograph about algorithmic management and artificial intelligence at work.

He is the co-editor of the Dispatches Session of the Comparative Labour Law and Policy Journal and an Editorial Adviser of the International Labour Review.

Prof. De Stefano acted as a consultant for the International Labour Office, the European Parliament, Eurofound, the Joint Research Center of the EU Commission and national governments. His research is also frequently referred to by governments and international organisations, including the International Labour Organisation, the OECD, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, and has been cited by courts, parliamentary bills, policy reports, employers’ and workers’ organizations, and media worldwide.

Besides numerous academic conferences, lectures and seminars, he was invited to speak as an expert on the labour protection of new forms of work at the European Parliament, the European Social and Economic Committee, the OECD, and the Canada-EU dialogue on employment, social affairs and decent work. He is a member of the OECD’s Network of Experts on AI (One AI).

Research Interests:  Labour Law, Employment Law, Law and Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Algorithmic Management, Artificial Intelligence and Work, Digitalisation and Society, Platform Work, Non-Standard Employment, International and Comparative Labour law.

Penney, Jonathon

Jon is a legal scholar and social scientist who joined the Faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2020. He is also a Research Affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a long time Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, he has studied law at Columbia Law School as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford University as a Mackenzie King Scholar. He holds a doctorate in “Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences” from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (Balliol College, 2016). Before joining Osgoode, he taught law at Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University and spent time as a Senior Research Fellow at the Technology and Social Change (TaSC) Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy and as a Research Affiliate of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Jon’s research and teaching expertise lies at the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with strong interdisciplinary and empirical dimensions. From established technologies like the internet and social media to emerging ones like artificial intelligence and machine learning, he aims to understand the legal, ethical, and human rights implications of technology and its role in public and private sector practices such as surveillance, privacy/data protection, cybersecurity, disinformation/manipulation, online abuse, and automated legal enforcement. His work has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, Reuters International, New York Times, Newsweek, TIME Magazine, NBC News, and The Intercept among others.  Recently, his research on privacy and chilling effects was chronicled by Harvard Magazine and won the Reidenberg—Kerr Paper Award at the 2020 Privacy Law Scholars Conference at UC Berkeley Law.

Beyond research and teaching, Jon serves on Advisory Boards for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a non-profit whose mission is to combat online abuse that threatens civil rights and civil liberties, and the Law Commission of Ontario’s AI and Administrative Decision-Making Project. Additionally, he serves on the Board of Directors for The Canadian Technology Law Association and the Steering Committee for the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshop, which is co-located at the annual USENIX Security Symposium.

Follow him on Twitter here.

Research Interests:  Technology Law, Privacy/Surveillance, Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Human Rights, Online Abuse/Harassment, Disinformation/Manipulation, Empirical/Computational Legal Studies, Private Law.

Berger, Kate Glover

Professor Kate Glover Berger joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2020.  From 2015-2020, Professor Berger was an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Western University, where she was co-director of Western Law’s Public law research group and taught Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, and specialized seminars in Public Law.  Professor Berger earned her doctorate in law from McGill University as a Vanier Scholar and held the O’Brien Fellowship in Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.  She earned her masters in law from the University of Cambridge, where she was the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin Senior Scholar. In 2009-2010, she served as law clerk to the Honourable Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada.  Professor Berger has appeared as counsel before all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada, and has served as an expert witness before the Senate, providing testimony to the Special Senate Committee on Senate Modernization. She is the academic chair of the Annual National Forum on Administrative Law and chair of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers.

Professor Berger’s scholarly and teaching expertise lies in administrative and constitutional law. She researches and publishes widely in these areas, with an emphasis on administrative law and its relationship to the constitution; the nature of the administrative state; the design of institutions and fair process; judicial review of administrative action; and constitutional principles, architecture, and amendment. Her research appears in leading Canadian and international journals and edited collections, and has been translated for inclusion in international publications.  She is the author of “The Principles and Practices of Procedural Fairness” in Administrative Law in Context, 3d ed (Toronto: Emond, 2018) and the chapter on Canada in Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment (Oxford: Hart, 2017). Professor Berger has been invited to present her scholarship across Canada and around the world, including at the Frontiers of Public Law Conference (University of Melbourne & University of Cambridge), the Colloque sur la modification constitutionelle dans tous ses états (Palace des Académies, Brussels), and the Comparative Public Law Workshop (American Society for Comparative Law & University of Ottawa). In 2017-18, Professor Berger held the inaugural Dean’s Research Fellowship at Western Law.  In 2017, her research was awarded the Prix d’Excellence de L’Association des Doyens des Études Supérieures au Québec.

A recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the Western Law Award for Teaching Excellence (2015-16) and the J. McLeod Professor of the Year Award (2016-17), Professor Berger teaches JD courses and seminars in administrative law, constitutional law, and advanced public law. She is also active in graduate legal education, and in addition to supervising graduate research at both the masters and doctoral level, she has taught graduate courses on research methods and legal inquiry.  Committed to ongoing legal education, Professor Berger also lectures on specialized topics of public law in professional development programs.

Research interests: Administrative Law, Constitutional Law, and Public Law

Hewitt, Jeffery G.

Jeffery G. Hewitt joined Osgoode Hall Law School in 2019 as an Assistant Professor. After graduating from Osgoode with an LLB in 1996, Professor Hewitt returned to complete his LLM in 2015. He focuses a lot on matters starting with “I” – such as Indigenous, Interdisciplinary and Iconic. Professor Hewitt’s research interests include Indigenous legal orders and governance, constitutional law, human rights, legal education, business law, as well as art + law and visual legal studies. He mainly teaches constitutional law and Indigenous-related courses and seminars.

Professor Hewitt has also presented his research work nationally and internationally to a range of audiences. He is mixed-descent Cree, was called to the Bar in Ontario in 1998 and works with Rama First Nation as well as various Indigenous Elders, leaders and organizers in the promotion of Indigenous legal orders. He has done a mix of other things as well, serving as past-President of the Indigenous Bar Association of Canada, director of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, and he once wore an iconic NASA space suit. Currently, Professor Hewitt is on the Executive of Legal Leaders for Diversity, and serves as a director of both the Indigenous Bar Association Foundation as well as the National Theatre School of Canada.

Somehow, along the way Professor Hewitt has managed to collect a few acknowledgments including a 2019 Law Society of Ontario Medal; a 2019 Excellence in Research Award, University of Windsor; a 2017 Teaching Award from the University of Windsor; the 2015 Charles D. Gonthier Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice; a 2014 Teaching Award from Osgoode; a 2013-14 McMurtry Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School; and a 2011 Canadian General Counsel Award for Social Responsibility.

White, Emily Kidd

Professor Emily Kidd White’s areas of teaching and research specialization are in legal and political philosophy, constitutional law, and public international law. Professor Kidd White completed her doctoral studies at New York University School of Law as a Trudeau Foundation Scholar, having previously graduated from the LLM in International Legal Studies with the Jerome Lipper Prize for distinction. Kidd White holds a JD from the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University (Dean’s Honour List) and a BAH (Politics/Philosophy) from Queen’s University (First Class Degree).

Professor Kidd White began her association at Osgoode Hall Law School as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security.  Prior to joining the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School, Professor Kidd White held a two-year research fellowship at the Jean Monnet Center for Regional and International Economic Law and Justice, and a teaching position with the Institute for International Law and Justice. Professor Kidd White is a faculty member of the Ontario Legal Philosophy Partnership

Professor Kidd White Kidd White is a General Editor of the Supreme Court Law Review Annual Osgoode Constitutional Cases Review. Previously, she served as the Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Law, a world-leading peer-reviewed international law journal.

Professor Kidd White’s current research interests consider legal argumentation, and the public nature and promise of law. A particular focus is on the ways in which political communities interpret the legal values and principles embedded in legal texts and judgements, and the ways in which they draw upon local, regional, or international histories and experiences to provide these legal values and principles with shape and clarity.

Professor Kidd White is an emerging scholar in the field of law and emotions, holding an extensive international and interdisciplinary network on the subject. Her manuscript on Judicial Emotions is under contract with Oxford University Press, and has been accepted into its distinguished Law and Philosophy Series. Along with Susan Bandes, Jody Madeira, and Kathryn Temple, Professor Kidd White is editing the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Emotions.

Professor Kidd White has presented her research at leading institutions around the world, including Oxford University, Yale Law School, UNAM, the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, New York University School of Law, Cardoza Law School, Georgetown Law School, the London School of Economics, and Melbourne Law School.

Research Interests: Legal and Political Philosophy, Constitutional Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, Human Rights, Discrimination Law, Public International Law, Law and Emotions, Law and Literature, Legal Reasoning.

Smith, Adrian A.

Professor Adrian Smith joined the Osgoode Hall Law School faculty in July 2018 as Associate Professor and will serve a term as Academic Director of Parkdale Community Legal Services (PCLS), teaching the intensive seminar in poverty law.  He arrives from Carleton University’s Department of Law and Legal Studies where he enjoyed cross-appointment to the Institute of Political Economy and the Institute of African Studies.  Prior to his appointment in 2011, he completed a Bachelor of Arts (BA, Honours) in Political Science and History at Western, a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and Master of Laws (LLM) at Osgoode, and doctoral studies at McGill Faculty of Law, for which he received a SSHRC ‘CGS’ Doctoral Scholarship.

His areas of interest broadly relate to law, political economy and development.  He researches the regulation of labour in colonial and settler colonial contexts, including temporary labour migration in Canada.  He also has interests in popular legal education in social movements, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and visual legal studies — among other areas.  His research projects have taken him to northern Africa, western Europe, South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Mexico and throughout the U.S. and Canada.  He has been privileged to work with youth environmental justice activists from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, near Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, and has undertaken research in relation to renewable energy in the territory of Batchewana First Nation, near Sault Ste. Marie.  He is a researcher in the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, “Reconciling Sovereignties: New Techniques for ‘Authorizing’ Extraction on Indigenous Territories” in partnership with the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade (INET) and Mining Watch Canada (led by Professor Shiri Pasternak).

Professor Smith’s work can be found in a range of journals and edited collections.  He is co-editor of Unfree Labour? Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada (PM Press, with Professor Aziz Choudry).

While at Carleton, Professor Smith taught Regulating Work in the Global Economy, Settler Colonialism and Belonging In Canada (Research Methods), Historical Perspectives on Law and Society, Law and Development, and Labour Law.  For two years he also co-taught the core doctoral seminar in political economy.  Following his term at PCLS, he will teach labour law.

Professor Smith is a youth basketball coach, with Toronto Triple Threat Basketball Club and Ontario Basketball’s Summer Development and Centre for Performance (CP) Programs.

Research Interests: regulation of labour, law and development, critical political economy approaches to law, temporary labour migration, racism, settler colonialism, social movements and law.