Type: Faculty

Berger, Benjamin L.

Professor Benjamin L. Berger is Professor and York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Professor Berger served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018. He holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. Prior to joining Osgoode, he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, and was cross-appointed in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Victoria, where he began teaching in 2004. He holds a JSD and LLM from Yale University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar and a SSHRC doctoral fellow. He earned his LLB and the Law Society Gold Medal from the University of Victoria, and was awarded the Gold Medal in Arts and the Governor General’s Academic Medal for his BA (Hons) studies at the University of Alberta. In 2002-2003, Professor Berger served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada.

His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence.  He has published broadly in these fields and his work has appeared in leading legal and interdisciplinary journals and edited collections.  He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and served as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society from 2014-2018. He is also co-editor of multiple edited collections, including Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority (Hart, 2016) and The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). He has been a principal investigator or collaborator on multiple research grants and has received awards for his scholarly work, including the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination” and, in 2015, the CALT-ACPD Prize for Academic Excellence.

Professor Berger is active in judicial, professional, and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. While at UVic Law, Professor Berger twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award. He received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.

Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought and is the Academic Program Director of the Osgoode Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure.

Research Interests: Law and Religion; Criminal and Constitutional Law and Theory; the Law of Evidence; Legal History; Judgment and the Judiciary; Law and the Humanities.

Chiodo, Suzanne

Professor Suzanne Chiodo’s areas of teaching and research specialization are in civil procedure, class actions and access to justice. Professor Chiodo joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2022. From 2020 to 2022, she was a visiting professor at Western University Faculty of Law, where she taught civil procedure, class actions and other litigation-related courses. Prior to that, she taught tort and criminal law as a stipendiary lecturer at the University of Oxford and legal process as an adjunct faculty member at Osgoode.

Professor Chiodo earned her doctorate in law as a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her undergraduate studies in modern history. She earned her master of laws degree from Osgoode in 2017 and a juris doctor with distinction from Western Law in 2011. At Western, she helped to establish the Western Journal of Legal Studies. Before entering academia, Professor Chiodo practiced as a class actions lawyer and insurance defence lawyer. She served as a judicial clerk to Justice James A. O’Reilly with the Federal Court of Canada and was called to the Ontario bar in 2012.

Professor Chiodo has published widely in her field. Her book The Class Actions Controversy: The Origins and Development of the Ontario Class Proceedings Act was based on her LLM thesis and was published in 2018 by Irwin Law and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. It won the Peter Oliver Prize in Canadian Legal History and was shortlisted for the 2019 Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker’s Book Award. She has written a chapter in Class Actions in Canada (Emond Montgomery, 2018), and has published numerous articles in the U.K.’s Civil Justice Quarterly, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Canadian Class Action Review and other journals in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Professor Chiodo’s work on class action reform has influenced policy thinking on both sides of the Atlantic. She co-organized one of the first class-actions conferences in England and has made submissions to the U.K. Ministry of Justice on legislative reform. In Ontario, her work was cited in the Law Commission of Ontario’s report Class Actions: Objectives, Experiences and Reforms, the first comprehensive review of class actions since they were enacted in the province. She has also made submissions to other legislatures around the world on the subject of class action reform.

Research Interests: civil procedure, access to justice, class actions, courts modernization, legal history, and the impact of COVID-19 on court processes.

 

Boittin, Margaret

Professor Boittin is the author of The Regulation of Prostitution in China: Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Based on ethnographic observation, interviews, and surveys, the book examines how the regulation of prostitution shapes both the lives of female sex workers and the frontline police officers and public health officials who are responsible for implementing the laws and policies that govern sex work in China. Boittin also conducts research on the regulation of human trafficking and forced labor. She has carried out randomized controlled trials examining rights awareness campaigns on labor abuse of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, and on attitudes and behaviors pertaining to human trafficking vulnerability of both the general population and police officers in Nepal.  Her research has been supported by the US Department of Labor, USAID, Humanity United, and the National Science Foundation.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, and her JD from Stanford. Her articles have been published in Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, and American Political Science Review.

McGregor, Deborah

Professor Deborah McGregor joined York University’s Osgoode Hall law faculty in 2015 as a cross-appointee with the Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change. Professor McGregor’s research has focused on Indigenous knowledge systems and their various applications in diverse contexts including water and environmental governance, environmental justice, forest policy and management, and sustainable development. Her research has been published in a variety of national and international journals and she has delivered numerous public and academic presentations relating to Indigenous knowledge systems, governance and sustainability. She co-edited Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age with Mario Blaser, Ravi De Costa and William Coleman (2010). She is co-editor (with Alan Corbiere, Mary Ann Corbiere and Crystal Migwans) of the Anishinaabewin conference proceedings series.

Professor McGregor, who is Anishinaabe from Whitefish River First Nation, Birch Island, Ontario, is the Primary Investigator on two current SSHRC-funded projects:

Indigenous Environmental (In)Justice: theory and practice. (Insight Grant). Co-applicants: Dayna Nadine Scott (Osgoode Hall Law School), Brenda Murphy (Wilfred Laurier University), Martha Stiegman (Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change). Collaborators: Mary Ann Corbiere (Laurentian University), Kathleen Padulo (Chiefs of Ontario), Sue Chiblow (Garden River First Nation), Nancy DeLeary (Chippewas of the Thames).

Indigenizing the First Nations Land Management Regime. (Insight Development Grant). Co-applicants: Heather Dorries (Carleton University) and Gabrielle Slowey (York University).

She is a co-applicant in two other current SSHRC projects:

Indigenous Knowledge Transfer in Urban Aboriginal Communities with Professor Kim Anderson (Wilfred Laurier University); and Exploring Distinct Indigenous Knowledge Systems to Inform Fisheries Governance and Management on Canada’s Coasts with Professor Lucia Fanning (Dalhousie University).

Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor McGregor was an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto and served as Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives and the Aboriginal Studies program. She has also served as Senior Policy Advisor, Aboriginal Relations at Environment Canada-Ontario Region. In addition to such posts, Professor McGregor remains actively involved in a variety of Indigenous communities, serving as an advisor and continuing to engage in community-based research and initiatives.

Professor McGregor coordinated an Indigenous Environmental Justice (IEJ) Symposium in May 2016 featuring the voices of women and youth. She also recently launched an IEJ website.

Research Interests: Indigenous environmental justice, Indigenous governance and law, sustainability, water governance and security, and Indigenous knowledge systems.

Dufraimont, Lisa

Professor Lisa Dufraimont joined Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2015. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of criminal law and procedure and evidence. Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Dufraimont held a faculty position at the Queen’s University Faculty of Law, where she began teaching as an Assistant Professor in 2006, became an Associate Professor in 2012, and served as Acting Associate Dean (Academic) for the first half of 2015. She earned her JD from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and was awarded both the Gold Medal and the Dean’s Key. She also holds an LLM and JSD from Yale University. She served as law clerk to the Honourable Justices Catzman, Carthy, Laskin and Rosenberg at the Court of Appeal for Ontario and was admitted to the Bar of Ontario in 2003.

Professor Dufraimont has published extensively on subjects related to criminal law and evidence, with a particular focus on the jury system and the psychological aspect of procedural and evidentiary rules. Her work has appeared in edited collections and in leading law journals including the McGill Law Journal, the Queen’s Law Journal, the UBC Law Review, the Supreme Court Law Review, the Canadian Criminal Law Review and the Criminal Law Quarterly. She was Co-Investigator on a SSHRC-funded psycho-legal research project investigating the effects of Canadian jury pattern jury instructions on the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

She is co-author of Evidence: Principles and Problems, 10th ed. (with Delisle, Stuart & Tanovich, 2012) and Canadian Evidence Law in a Nutshell, 3rd ed. (with Delisle, 2009). She is Associate Editor of the Criminal Reports and a regular contributor to the National Judicial Institute’s Criminal Essentials Eletter, which is distributed monthly to about 1000 Canadian judges.

Professor Dufraimont presents regularly at legal and judicial education seminars. While at Queen’s, she received the Law Students’ Society Teaching Excellence Award.

Research Interests: Evidence, Criminal Law and Procedure, Law and Psychology

Faraday, Fay

Fay Faraday joined the Osgoode faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2018.  She graduated as the gold medalist from Osgoode in 1993 and has taught at Osgoode since 2010. She was an inaugural McMurtry Visiting Clinical Fellow in 2012, and a Visiting Professor at the law school until June 2018.  She also held York University’s Packer Visiting Chair in Social Justice at the Politics Department from 2014 to 2018. She has been a scholar in residence and faculty affiliate with York University’s Global Labour Research Centre since 2014.

Professor Faraday teaches in the areas of social and economic justice, including labour and employment law, labour migration, human rights, appellate advocacy, ethical lawyering, clinical legal education, and social justice and political activism.  She has published extensively in the areas of Charter rights, constitutional law, human rights and labour law. She is the co-author and co-editor of a book on equality rights under the Charter:  Making Equality Rights Real:  Securing Substantive Equality Under the Charter (Irwin Law, 2006), the co-author of a book on equality rights under Ontario’s Human Rights Code: Enforcing Human Rights in Ontario (Canada Law Book, 2009), and co-author and co-editor of a book on labour rights under the Charter:  Constitutional Labour Rights in Canada:  Farm Workers and the Fraser Case (Irwin Law, 2012).

She also holds an Innovation Fellowship with the Metcalf Foundation and is engaged in legal and community-based research on the rights of migrant workers.  She has published three landmark reports on migrant worker rights in Canada:  Made in Canada: How the Law Constructs Migrant Workers’ Insecurity (2012); Profiting from the Precarious:  How Recruitment Practices Exploit Migrant Workers (2014); and Canada’s Choice: Decent Work or Entrenched Exploitation for Canada’s Migrant Workers? (2016).

She is also a social justice lawyer, strategic adviser and policy consultant at Faraday Law.  She represents unions, community organizations and coalitions in constitutional and appellate litigation, human rights, administrative/public law, labour and pay equity. She also works collaboratively with community groups and coalitions to provide strategic and policy advice on constitutional and human rights issues, and on law reform.  In her work as a lawyer, she has addressed a wide range of issues relating to equality and fundamental freedoms under the Charter, gender and work, rights of migrant workers, rights of persons with disabilities, race discrimination, employment equity, poverty, income security, socioeconomic rights, and international human rights norms. She has represented clients in constitutional litigation at all levels of court, including numerous cases at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Since 2017 she has served as the Discrimination and Harassment Counsel for the Law Society of Ontario.

Active in community organizing with migrant and marginalized workers for over 25 years, she is currently the co-chair of the Equal Pay Coalition.

Research Interests:  Labour and employment, Migrant Workers, Equality, Human Rights, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Constitutional Law, Public Law, Ethical Lawyering, Social Justice and Political Activism, Race, Gender.

Zemans, Frederick H.

Frederick H. Zemans is the founding Director of Parkdale Community Legal Services – Ontario’s first community-based legal aid clinic that was established in 1971 – and of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law.

He was the Director of Clinical Education at Osgoode for many years and was one of the original faculty teaching in Osgoode’s undergraduate and graduate programs in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR).

Professor Zemans’ publications have focused primarily on the Canadian legal profession, access to justice, legal services for low-income persons, and alternative dispute resolution and quality assurance of state-funded legal services.   In recent years, he co-authored:  From Crisis to Reform:  A  New Legal Aid Plan for Ontario; Access to Justice for a New Century – The Way Forward; The Evaluation of the  Mandatory Mediation Pilot Project in Ottawa and Toronto; The Theory and Practice of Representative Negotiations (Emond Montgomery: 2007) and  An Evaluation of the Pilot Project of Three Criminal Law Offices (Legal Aid  Ontario: 2008).

Professor Zemans has been a Butterworth’s Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, University of London, and a visitor at Kobe University Law Department and the University of California at Los Angeles.  He served for many years as Chair of boards of inquiry for the Ontario Human Rights Commission and, in recent years, as a mediator and facilitator in private and public disputes.

Young, Alan N.

Alan Young is the Co-Founder and former Director of Osgoode’s Innocence Project, which is a clinical program that guides JD students through the process of investigating suspected cases of wrongful conviction and imprisonment. He also maintains a small practice specializing in criminal law and procedure that is primarily devoted to challenging state authority to criminalize consensual activity.

He has brought constitutional challenges to our gambling, obscenity, bawdy-house and drug laws, and for nearly two decades has provided free legal services to those whose alternative lifestyles have brought them into conflict with the law.  He has represented countless numbers of people suffering from AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis who were charged after using marijuana for medicinal purposes, and as a result of these cases, the Federal Government was compelled to create a regulatory program authorizing the use of medical marijuana.  In addition to his work in the area of consensual crime, Professor Young has also provided free legal services to victims of violent crime and to individuals attempting to sue the government for malicious prosecution.

Canadian Lawyer magazine has recognized the contributions Professor Young has made to the law, and named him one of the “Top 25 Most Influential” in the justice system and legal profession in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. He is the author of Justice Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers and Lawyers (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003).

Williams, Cynthia

Professor Cynthia Williams joined Osgoode Hall Law School on July 1, 2013 as the Osler Chair in Business Law, a position she also held from 2007 to 2009. Before coming to Osgoode, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law and, prior to that, she practised law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City.

Professor Williams writes in the areas of securities law, corporate law, corporate responsibility, comparative corporate governance and regulatory theory, often in interdisciplinary collaborations with professors in anthropology, economic sociology, and organizational psychology.

Her book The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor, And Finance Capitalism, co-edited with Osgoode Professor Peer Zumbansen, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press and was featured at the Society for Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference in 2012 at MIT.

Professor Williams’ work has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Journal of Corporation Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, the University of New South Wales Law Journal, the Virginia Law Review, the Academy of Management Review, the Corporate Governance International Review, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior, among others.

Professor Williams has lectured and taught in China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Spain, the UK and throughout Canada and the United States.

Professor Williams also engages in policy work through her board membership in the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, a think-tank of academics and financial market participants; the Climate Bonds Initiative, an NGO established to create a new asset class, Climate Bonds, in order to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy; and as a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finance Advisory Board.

Walker, Janet

Janet Walker is a full professor and past Associate Dean. She currently teaches private international law, international commercial arbitration and complex litigation in the JD and the professional LLM programs and is Director of the Professional LLM in Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution. She has also taught Civil Procedure, Professional Responsibility and International Business Transactions and has served as Convener of the Litigation, Dispute Resolution and the Administration of Justice Stream, and Director of the Mooting Program.

Professor Walker is the author of Castel and Walker: Canadian Conflict of Laws, and the Halsbury’s Laws of Canada volume on the Conflict of Laws; she is the General Editor of The Civil Litigation Process, and of Class Actions in Canada, and co-editor of Common Law, Civil Law and the Future of Categories. She is also a co-author of Irwin Essentials: Civil Procedure, Private International Law in Common Law Canada, and A Practical Guide to Mooting.

Professor Walker has lectured in Wuhan and Xi’an, and she has taught Conflict of Laws as a visitor at Monash, University of Haifa and University of Toronto, as a Hauser Global Visiting Professor at NYU in New York and in its joint program with NUS in Singapore, and at Monash University’s Prato Campus. She taught comparative procedure as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford, and advocacy at University of Zagreb’s Zadar Program, and for the past thirteen years, she has taught private international law as a Foreign Research Professor at Tunis II, where she has also led the International Lawyers for Africa Tunisian National Committee. Professor Walker has led the Osgoode summer program at Hebrew University of Jerusalem on five occasions, and served as faculty advisor to the Osgoode Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot for the past thirteen years and the Tunis team for four years.

Professor Walker has lectured at The Hague Academy of International Law Summer Program and co-chaired the 72nd Biennial Conference of the International Law Association and the International Association of Procedural Law’s Toronto Conference; and she led the Project on Teaching Procedure, which produced the OHLJ Special Issue on Teaching Procedure.

Professor Walker has served as an International Advisor to the American Law Institute in its project with Unidroit to develop Principles and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure; and as a member of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada Committee on National Class Actions, of the IBA Task Force on Guidelines on Recognition and Enforcement of Collective Redress Judgments, of the ILA Committee on International Civil Litigation, the ABA Canada/US Class Working Group on Protocols for Parallel Class Actions and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada’s Project on Uniform International Arbitration Legislation. She has served as President of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association, Chair of the Toronto Chapter of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, and she is Secretary General of the International Association of Procedural Law. Professor Walker was the Law Commission of Ontario’s first Scholar in Residence, she has been the Common Law Advisor to the Federal Courts Rules Committee since 2006, and she is currently serving as Academic Advisor to the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.

Professor Walker is a member of the American Law Institute and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. She is a member of the University Club of Toronto, the Athenaeum Club in London.

Professor Walker has served as an ICC and ICDR arbitrator in various matters and she consults and serves as expert in matters of international litigation and arbitration and complex litigation. She is a member of the panel of foreign arbitrators of the ICDR, CIETAC, SHIAC, KLRCA and a member arbitrator of Arbitration Place, Toronto, and Outer Temple Chambers, London.

Research Interests: International Litigation and Arbitration, Comparative Procedure, Advocacy.