Type: Faculty

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.

Parachin, Adam

Professor Adam Parachin teaches and researches in the areas of charity, trust, property and personal income tax law.  His research specialization in charity law is concerned with the various ways the law defines and celebrates charity – defined as “doing good by others”.  His publications in the field are generally concerned with three questions raised this formulation of charity:  What constitutes “doing good”?  Who qualifies as an “other”?  How and why does the law affirm, incentivize and promote the voluntary choice to do good by others?

Prior to joining Osgoode Hall, Professor Parachin was an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at Western University, where he began teaching in 2004.  While at Western University, he was a three-time recipient of the Professor of the Year Award and eight-time recipient of the Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence.

Professor Parachin’s research was awarded the Douglas J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award by the Canadian Tax Foundation.  He is also a past recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant for a multi-year project dealing with the income tax treatment of charitable gifts.

Professor Parachin is active in professional and public education.  He is an Adjunct Research Professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University.  In addition, he is a board member (and writer) for the Pemsel Case Foundation – a charitable foundation established to study and advance the common law of charity.  He is also a member of the Canada Revenue Agency’s Charity Directorate Technical Issues Working Group.

Research Interests: Charity law, Estates Law, Trust Law, Property Law, Personal Income Tax Law, Human Rights in Private Law

Hoffman, Steven

Dr. Steven J. Hoffman is the Dahdaleh Distinguished Chair in Global Governance & Legal Epidemiology and a Professor of Global Health, Law, and Political Science at York University, the Director of the Global Strategy Lab, the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance, and the Scientific Director of the CIHR Institute of Population & Public Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He holds a courtesy appointment as a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics (Part-Time) at McMaster University. He is an international lawyer licensed in both Ontario and New York who specializes in global health law, global governance and institutional design. His research leverages various methodological approaches to craft global strategies that better address transnational health threats and social inequalities. Past studies have focused on access to medicines, antimicrobial resistance, health misinformation, pandemics and tobacco control.

Steven previously worked as a Project Manager for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and as a Fellow in the Executive Office of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York City, where he offered strategic and technical input on a range of global health issues. He also previously worked for a Toronto law firm specializing in cross-border intellectual property litigation, health product regulation, and government relations. Steven advised the World Health Organization on development of a global strategy for health systems research and was lead author on the background paper that provided the strategy’s conceptual underpinnings. For three years he convened an academic advisory committee on science reporting for Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine. He was previously an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa (2014-2017), Adjunct Professor of Global Health & Population at Harvard University (2015-2020) and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford (2018-2019).

Van Wagner, Estair

Professor Estair Van Wagner researches and teaches in the areas of natural resource law and property law and is co-director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic. Her work explores how law is used to structure relations with the environment. Professor Van Wagner joined Osgoode in 2017 from the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law in Aotearoa New Zealand where she taught Property, Natural Resource, and Resource Management Law.

She is involved in a number of SSHRC funded research grants, including as the PI of a large-collaborative SSHRC grant examining the relationship between Aboriginal title, Indigenous property and land use systems, and private property on Vancouver Island with Dr Sarah Morales and Dr Mike Ekers. She is a member of the Domestic Law Stream of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership, a Canada-wide network working to support Indigenous-led conservation. Professor Van Wagner is working with Professor Dayna Scott on a national project examining Indigenous-led impact assessment to inform the development of federal assessment practice. She also continues to do research on Maori law and mining Aotearoa New Zealand in an ongoing collaboration with Dr Maria Bargh.

Professor Van Wagner is also the PI on a grant with the Shift, a global movement for the right to housing, examining the human rights dimensions of homeless encampments in Canadian cities with Dr Kaitlin Schwan, Dr Alexandra Flynn, Dr Priya Gupta, and Dr Deborah Curran. Professor Van Wagner is also co-leading the Feminist Judgments Project – Canada in which feminist legal scholars are reimagining judicial decisions and legislative frameworks to articulate alternative legal relations and futures.

Professor Van Wagner completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies in political science, law, and environmental studies at the University of Victoria, Osgoode Hall Law School, and York University in Canada. Following this, she served as a judicial law clerk at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. She worked as a labour and human rights lawyer, as an academic researcher on a number of interdisciplinary projects, and as a political advisor at the local and federal level in Canada.

Nedelsky, Jennifer

Professor Jennifer Nedelsky joined Osgoode in January 2018. She was previously Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Toronto and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Legal Theory, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism.

Her most recent book, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011) won the C.B. Macpherson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. She is currently completing a jointly authored manuscript (with Tom Malleson), A Care Manifesto: (Part) Time for All (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

Once the book is done, Professor Nedelsky [BA (Rochester); MA and PhD (Chicago)] will return to her book manuscript, Judgment in Law and Life, building on Hannah Arendt’s unfinished theory of judgment. She will also be developing a larger partnership project on restructuring work and care.

Nadler, Jennifer

Professor Jennifer Nadler has been appointed a full-time faculty member, effective July 1, 2017.

Professor Nadler has been a Visiting Scholar at Osgoode and an instructor of Contract Law and Property Law in Osgoode Professional Development’s Common Law LLM Program since 2013. The recipient of numerous academic honours over the past several years, she received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2014.

She has BA, JD and SJD degrees from the University of Toronto as well as an LLM from New York University. Her doctoral dissertation was a study of the private law implications of the conceptions of freedom portrayed in the novels of Henry James. She publishes in the areas of private law, theoretical jurisprudence, and law and literature.

Drake, Karen

Karen Drake is a member of the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation who researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian law as it affects Indigenous peoples, Anishinaabe constitutionalism, Indigenous pedagogy within legal education, property law, and dispute resolution including civil procedure and Indigenous dispute resolution. Professor Drake served as Osgoode’s Associate Dean (Students) throughout the pandemic, from July 2020 to June 2023. She joined the Osgoode faculty in July 2017 from the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University where she had been a founding Co-Editor in Chief of the Lakehead Law Journal. Prior to joining Lakehead, she articled with Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, completed a clerkship with the Ontario Court of Appeal, served as a part-time judicial law clerk with the Federal Court, and practised with Erickson & Partners, focusing on legal issues impacting Indigenous peoples, human rights, and civil litigation.

Professor Drake is currently the principal investigator, in partnership with the Sarnia-Lambton Native Friendship Centre, on a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant, which will be used to develop a methodology for assessing the effectiveness of the Bkejwanong (Walpole Island) First Nation Court and the Sarnia Indigenous Persons Court. Professor Drake has presented at education seminars held for Canada’s Department of Justice, Ontario’s Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and the National Judicial Institute. She was the recipient of the Osgoode Legal and Literary Society’s Equity Award in 2018, and of the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2019.

She is a member of the legal advisory panel for RAVEN and previously served as a Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, on the Board of Directors of the Indigenous Bar Association, and on the Board of Directors of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre.

Bandopadhyay, Saptarishi

I am an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. I am also a research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University, and a Senior Fellow at Melbourne University Law School.

My first book, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. In All Is Well, I offer a history of the mutually constitutive relationship between disasters and states during the eighteenth-century and show the enduring influence of the underlying narratives, instincts, techniques, and practices on global disaster management today.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first examines the history of war, environmental degradation/disasters, and human displacement from 1860 to the present. This research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council Insight Development Grant and supported by Osgoode Hall Law School, York University’s Center for Refugee Studies, and the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research. The second book project presents a legal and environmental history of the relationship between the international environmentalism movement of the 1960s and 70s, and contemporary global crises of food insecurity and climate change.

I have published in encyclopedias, edited volumes and in legal and interdisciplinary journals such as the University of British Columbia Law Review, the Fordham Environmental Law Review, Global Jurist, the Indian Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights. I occasionally write essays and book reviews for public facing periodicals and websites and have developed several case studies for Harvard Law School’s Case Studies Program.

During 2016-2017, I was a Visiting Professor and Catalyst Fellow at Osgoode, and an adjunct faculty at Northeastern University School of Law. I hold an SJD, an interdisciplinary doctorate from Harvard Law School, LLMs from Harvard Law School and American University’s Washington College of Law, and a BA LLB (with honors) from the National University of Juridical Sciences, India.

At Harvard, I received the Irving Oberman Memorial Environmental Law Prize and the Abram Chayes International Public Service Fellowship. I have also received research and advocacy fellowships from the Canadian Social Sciences and Research Council, the American Society for Legal History, the American Society for Environmental History, the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University’s Office for Scholarly Communication, the Public International Law and Policy Group, the Center for International Environmental Law, Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

I have studied and worked in disaster management in central India, in the borderlands between India, Pakistan, and China, and in the Philippines. I have also trained and advised officials and civil society in India, Thailand, Canada, and at the United Nations. From 2006 to 2010, I was an associate with Radon & Ishizumi in New York and worked on pharmaceutical and biotechnology projects. During this time, I also advised public authorities and corporate clients on constitution development in Nepal and environmental policymaking in the Caucasus, respectively.

Twitter: @saptarishi_b

Research Interests: Law, history, and politics of Disasters, International law, State formation, Environmental law and politics, Environmental conflict, Humanitarianism, Human displacement, Risk, Copyright.

Matthews, Heidi

Professor Heidi Matthews researches and teaches in the areas of international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory. Her work theorizes contemporary shifts in the practice and discourse of the global legal regulation of political violence, with particular attention to history and gender, as well as political, critical and aesthetic theory.

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Matthews held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the SOAS School of Law, University of London. She served as a law clerk to the judges of the Appeals Chamber at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and as an intern at the Immediate Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Her doctoral dissertation, “From Aggression to Atrocity: Interrogating the Jus in Bello Turn in International Criminal Law” was awarded Harvard Law School’s Laylin Prize. Professor Matthews has been a Fellow of the Institute for Global Law and Policy and a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School, as well as a Fellow at the Film Study Center, the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Professor Matthews’ current projects include a critical legal evaluation of American, Canadian and British counterinsurgency policy and practice, a reevaluation of the role of international criminal law during the Cold War, and an intellectual and political history of the concept of military necessity in international law. She is also working on a research and documentary film project that examines narratives of Allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women at the end of World War II. Professor Matthews is active in several international research networks, including the Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law and Cold War International Law projects.

Research Interests: International Criminal Law; Law of War/International Humanitarian Law; Public International Law; International Human Rights Law; Feminist, Legal and Political Theory; Law and the Arts.

Paciocco, Palma

Professor Palma Paciocco’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of criminal law and theory, criminal procedure, evidence, sentencing, and professional ethics. She holds an SJD from Harvard Law School, where she studied as a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she completed the Harvard Law School LLM program as a Thomas Shearer Stewart Travelling Fellow and a Landon H. Gammon Fellow (degree waived). She also holds BCL and LLB degrees from the McGill Faculty of Law, where she was awarded the gold medal, and a BA in philosophy and history from the McGill Faculty of Arts.

Professor Paciocco served as a law clerk to the Honourable Justice Louise Charron of the Supreme Court of Canada, and she is called to the bars of Ontario and New York.

Her scholarship examines a wide variety of criminal justice issues and has been published in leading journals. She is co-author of The Law of Evidence, 8th Ed. (with D.M. Paciocco and L. Steusser, 2020), which is among Canada’s leading texts in evidence law. Her doctoral dissertation examined the ethical obligations of prosecutors engaged in plea bargaining.

Professor Paciocco co-directs the Juris Doctor/Master of Arts in Philosophy Program and is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Law and Society Association. She is a frequent lecturer at continuing education programs for judges and lawyers. She was awarded the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2018.

Research Interests: Criminal Law and Theory, Criminal Procedure, the Law of Evidence, Sentencing, Professional Ethics, Law and the Humanities.