Kent McNeil is an Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he taught from 1987 to 2016. His research focuses on the rights of Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. In 2007, he received a Killam Fellowship to pursue this research. In 2019, he was the Law Foundation of Saskatchewan H. Robert Arscott Chair at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, his alma mater.
In addition to his academic work, Professor McNeil has acted as a consultant for numerous Indigenous organizations and has been an expert witness in court cases in Canada and Belize. He is currently working on sovereignty issues in relation to the European colonization of North America and the development of international law in this context. He will be pursuing this research as a Fulbright Canada Distinguished Chair in International Area Studies at Yale University in 2021-22.
John D. McCamus has been a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1971. Prior to his faculty appointment, he served as Law Clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice Laskin of the Supreme Court of Canada. He teaches Contract, Commercial and Consumer Transactions, Contract Remedies, and Restitution. Professor McCamus is the author of The Law of Contracts, The Law of Restitution, editor of Freedom of Information: Canadian Perspectives, and co-editor of National Security: Surveillance and Accountability in a Democratic Society, and Cases and Materials on Contracts, 3d ed. Additionally, he has written several articles covering various aspects of the law of restitution, contracts, freedom of information, and the protection of privacy. He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Restatement of Restitution 3d. Professor McCamus has a notable history of contribution to law reform efforts. He has produced a number of research monographs for the Ontario Law Reform Commission and served as its Chair from 1992 to 1996. In 1996-97, he chaired the Ontario Legal Aid Review. Professor McCamus served as Dean of the Law School from 1982 to 1987. His academic service also includes former positions as Assistant and Associate Dean, and Director of Osgoode Hall Law School’s Graduate Program.
Jinyan Li is Professor of Tax Law and former Interim Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is currently the co-director of the LLM Tax program and academic director, Professional Graduate Studies Program.
Professor Li has authored, co-authored and co-edited numerous books, including: Income Tax at 100 Years: Essays and Reflections on the Income War Tax Act (2017); International Taxation in Canada (multiple editions); Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law (multiple editions); International Taxation in the Age of Electronic Commerce: A Comparative Study, and International Taxation in China: A Contextualized Analysis. She is the co-author chapter 13 (Capital Gains) of the Global Tax Treaty Commentaries on IBFD Tax Research Platform. She is the co-editor of Current Tax Readings, Canadian Tax Journal and a member of the editorial board of World Tax Journal. She has organized conferences and symposiums, the most recent of which are a symposium on Pillar Two (2022) and Women with Disabilities: Income Security and Tax Policy (2022).
Her work has been cited by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada in Deans Knight Income Corp., Alta Energy and MacDonald.
She has recently served on the Panel of Experts advising the Minister of Finance, Canada on reviewing tax expenditures and a member of the advisory committee to the Minister of National Revenue on the taxation of e-commerce. She has also been a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Auditor General of Canada, and the Department of Justice of Canada.
Professor Li has received numerous awards from external organizations, including: Tax Excellence Award (2021) from the Ontario Bar Association), Lifetime Contribution Award (2017) from the Canadian Tax Foundation, Academic Excellence Award (2007) from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers, and D.J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award (1999). She was a York University Research Leader (2017) and recipient of teaching awards (2004 and 2014). She is currently on the Council of IFA Canada and a speaker at Canadian and international conferences.
Professor Sonia Lawrence joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2001. She graduated from the University of Toronto’s joint LLB/MSW program, went on to serve as law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada, and pursued graduate work at Yale Law School. Her work centers on critical analyses of legal conception of equality.
Sonia has served in a number of administrative roles at Osgoode including Assistant Dean of First Year and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. Her current teaching includes a first year public and constitutional law, a seminar in critical race theory, and serving as the academic director/instructor for Feminist Advocacy, a clinical legal education opportunity offered in partnership with the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto. In the past she has served as the academic director for Osgoode’s Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (offered in partnership with the Human Rights Legal Support Centre (Ontario), and taught seminars in gender equality, graduate research and research methods, among others. Sonia is serving two terms as the President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers / Association Canadienne des Professeurs de Droit.
Research Interests: Public Law, Gender, Race, Critical Race Feminism, Feminism, Equality Law, Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Professor Shelley Kierstead’s research interests lie in the areas of family law, access to justice, and dispute resolution. She has also conducted research in the conflict of laws area, completing a Master of Laws degree focusing on this topic at the University of Toronto 1993. Professor Kierstead first taught Legal Research and Writing (LRW) at Osgoode in 1993, and became Director of the LRW program at Osgoode in 2002. In 2005, she completed a doctoral dissertation in the family law area and obtained a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. Since 1997, Professor Kierstead has also coordinated a parent education program for separating parents entitled the “Parent Information Program.” This program is an initiative of Osgoode’s Centre for Public Law and Public Policy. Research Interests: Family Law, Legal Process
A member of the Osgoode Hall Law School faculty since 1987, Professor Tom Johnson served as Co-Director of the Schulich and Osgoode joint JD/MBA Program, Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Business Law, Director of the Osgoode Business Clinic, and Co-Director of Osgoode’s LLM Program in Bankruptcy and Insolvency.
Professor Johnson’s areas of teaching included contract law, commercial law (secured transactions, bankruptcy and insolvency, capital market regulation, and international business transactions), international development, and project finance. He was a recipient of the Osgoode Teaching Excellence Award.
Professor Johnson has more than 30 years of experience as a consultant to the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, working on access to finance and land tenure reform projects in developing countries. In that role, he advised governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
After he became a lawyer in 1980, Shin Imai practised at Keewaytinok Native Legal Services in Moosonee and later had his own practice in the areas of human rights, refugee law and indigenous rights. He joined the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General in 1989 to work on the development of Alternative Dispute Resolution programs and to initiate justice projects in indigenous communities.
He was appointed to faculty at Osgoode in 1996 and is currently a director of the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project. He has served as Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services, the Director of the Intensive Program on Aboriginal Lands, Resources and Governments, Director of Clinical Education, and Co-director of the Latin American Network on Research and Education in Human Rights (RedLEIDH).
Imai was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award at the Law School in 2004 and 2007, and the University-wide Teaching Award in 2010.
A member of Osgoode’s faculty since 1982, Professor Allan Hutchinson served as Associate Dean from 1994 to 1996 and later, in 2003, he was named Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and External Relations). Professor Hutchinson is a legal theorist with an international reputation for his original and provocative writings. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and named a Distinguished Research Professor by York University in 2006. His research interests are law and politics; legal theory; the legal profession; constitutional law; torts; jurisprudence; civil procedure; and racism and law. As well as publishing in most of the common-law world’s leading law journals, he has written or edited many books. Much of his work has been devoted to examining the failure of law to live up to its democratic promise. His latest publications are Evolution and the Common Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Companies We Keep: Corporate Governance for a Democratic Society (Irwin Law, 2006). In 2007, he received the University-wide Teaching Award and was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.
Research Interests: Public Law, Legal Profession, Legal Theory
Professor Emeritus Douglas Hay was cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and York’s Department of History in 1981, teaching the comparative history of criminal procedure, punishment, and crime, and the history of private law in the common law world. He was co- director of an international project on the evolution of the contract of employment: Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (2004) and other titles, most recently ‘Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour and Law in Industrialization’ in Law With Class: Essays Inspired by the Work of Harry Glasbeek (2019) and ‘The Master and Servant Statute of 1823: Enlarging the Powers of Justices Act’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 43 (2022), 3-23.
Other work includes the English high court’s criminal jurisdiction (Criminal Cases on the Crown Side of King’s Bench 1740-1800 (2010); ‘Hanging and the English Judges: The Judicial Politics of Retention and Abolition,’ in America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (2010); D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, E.P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (2nd edition, with new introductions, 2011); ‘E.P. Thompson and the Rule of Law: Qualifying the Unqualified Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (2021), 202-220; and the ‘Preface’ to the concluding volume of Canadian State Trials, vol.5 (2022).
Professor Hay is presently writing about the administration of the criminal law in Georgian England, the role of the judiciary in King’s Bench, and the comparative history of criminal procedure in the British Empire. He has published books and articles on the history of English and Quebec criminal law; history of criminal procedure; social history of crime; judicial biography; courts and their political significance; and the history of employment law. He has been a visitor at Yale, Warwick, and Columbia law schools, and has been on the boards of the Canadian Historical Review, Law and History Review, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society for Legal History. He has given the Chorley Lecture (London School of Economics), the Iredell Lecture in Legal History (University of Lancaster), The Hugh Alan Maclean Lecture (University of Victoria Faculty of Law), the Weir Memorial Lecture (University of Alberta School of Law), the Annual Lecture for the American Society of Legal History, the Hugh Fitzpatrick Lecture in Legal Bibliography (Dublin), and the Richard Youard Lecture in Legal History (Oxford University). He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History in 2013, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Social Sciences) in 2016.
Richard A. Haigh is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and Director of York’s Centre for Public Policy and Law and Co-Director of the Part-Time LLM program in Constitutional Law at Osgoode Professional Development. He was, until December 2007, the Associate Director, Graduate Program at Osgoode Professional Development.
He has been a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, a Senior Advisor at the National Judicial Institute in Ottawa, and a Legal Research and Writing Lecturer at Osgoode. His research and teaching interests include Constitutional Law, Public Law, and Equity and Trusts, particularly the areas of freedom of conscience and religion.
His recent works include papers on the use of conscience and religion in legislative policies, whistleblowing, dialogue theory and freedom of expression’s relation to noise by-laws; he has also contributed a chapter to a book on legislating statutory interpretation, and a chapter to the casebook on public law (Emond, 3rd ed., 2015).