Professor Philip Girard is a co-recipient of the 2023 W. Wesley Pue Book Prize, awarded annually by the Canadian Law and Society Association (CLSA) for the best book on law and society published in the previous year in English or in French.

This year’s award, announced during the CLSA’s annual meeting at Osgoode on May 27, honours A History of Law in Canada Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion, 1867-1914, co-written by Girard, Jim Phillips, a professor of law, history and criminology at the University of Toronto, and R. Blake Brown, a professor of history at St. Mary’s University in Halifax. The book was published in 2022 by the University of Toronto Press and was designated as the 2022 members’ book by the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

“With History of Law in Canada, Volume Two, Jim Phillips, Philip Girard and R. Blake Brown have significantly contributed to law and society scholarship with a monumental book of legal history,” reads the award citation.

“Comprehensive and meticulously sourced,” it adds, “Phillips, Girard and Brown illustrate how plural legal orders – Indigenous law, common law and civil law – were impacted by the process of developing and consolidating a national legal order in Canada, and how fundamental aspects of the Canadian legal order took form between 1867 and 1914. Such a new and outstanding work in law and society is absolutely deserving of the CLSA’s W. Wesley Pue Book Prize.”

Founded in 1985, the CLSA is made up of scholars from many disciplines who are interested in the place of law in social, political, economic and cultural life. The Pue Prize, one of three main prizes awarded by the association each year, is named in memory of William Wesley Pue, a past president of the organization and a professor of legal history at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia who died in April 2019.

In 2011, Girard became the first Canadian to be made an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History and in 2021 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2021, he was also awarded the David Walter Mundell Medal for excellence in legal writing by the attorney general of Ontario. After a distinguished academic career spanning more than 40 years, he will officially retire from Osgoode in June 2023.

Legal scholars from across Canada gathered at Osgoode May 25^th and 26^th to advance work on a unique book examining the critical impact of women in shaping legal education in Canada.

“With women now making up more than half of most law school classes, it’s important to examine and analyze the lives and contributions of the women who taught them, especially because it has taken so long to have that same kind of representation in the front of the classroom,” said Osgoode Professor Patricia McMahon, who co-covened the workshop and is co-authoring the book’s concluding chapter.

Twelve of the book’s 16 contributors attended the third and final workshop, which was funded by Osgoode, the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant.

The project is led by the book’s co-editors, Anna Lund, an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta, and Virginia Torrie ’09, ’10 (LLM), a former associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba.

McMahon said the book will detail the diverse lives and contributions of the early women members of Canada’s legal academy, including some of the first women appointed to tenure-track positions, as well a university registrar, a librarian, an Indigenous Elder and the first Black woman law dean.

She said she joined the project in its early stages because of her work with the oral history program at the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, where she serves as program director. The society’s oral history program has so far collected more than 700 oral history interviews with members of the legal profession, including many women.

The as-yet untitled book is expected to be published by University of British Columbia Press later this year or early next year.

PhD students from law schools around the world will take their scholarship to the next level in June as they gather for the 13^th annual ATLAS Agora Summer School at Osgoode.

The unique event, which has been run since 2008 by the Association of Transnational Law Schools (ATLAS), will bring together 21 doctoral students from June 2 to 9. Along with Osgoode, the participating law schools or law faculties will include Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law in Israel, the Charles University Faculty of Law in the Czech Republic, Erasmus School of Law in the Netherlands, the University of Antwerp Faculty of Law in Belgium, the Sutherland School of Law at University College Dublin in Ireland, Université de Montréal Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Law at the University of Graz in Austria.

The theme of this year’s event is “Interdisciplinary and Public Facing Approaches to Legal Research.”

“This year’s ATLAS Agora is unique because all of its components are designed to help grad students ‘become’ well rounded academics,” said Professor Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, who is serving as this year’s ATLAS Agora director.

“The goal is to equip future grad students to see themselves as full-fledged academics and scholars in the real world,” he added. “We want to encourage them to think broadly about their specific legal questions, to encourage them to seek funding, to produce research that is of relevance to both specialist audiences and the general public, and to teach them to read the work of their peers critically but supportively.”

During each day of the Agora, the doctoral students will participate in an interdisciplinary seminar, PhD dissertation workshops and a professional development/knowledge dissemination seminar. Nine Osgoode faculty members are among those leading the seminars: Professors Jeffery Hewitt (Law and Indigeneity), Patricia McMahon (Legal History), Barnali Choudhury (Private Law and Climate Change), Rabiat Akande (Law & Religion), Emily Kidd White (Law and Emotion), Jennifer Nadler (Law and Philosophy), Deborah McGregor (Grant Applications) and Allan Hutchinson (Writing Essays/Op-Eds).

One of the highlights of this year’s Agora will be the PhD dissertation workshops, which are modelled on workshops organized at Harvard Law School, said Bandopadhyay. The students were asked to submit a paper of up to 8,000 words in advance and to read the papers of those in their group. Each workshop session will include four students and one faculty chair. Each paper will be discussed for approximately 30 to 35 minutes. Osgoode faculty leading the workshops will be Professors Craig Scott, Karen Drake, Dana Scott, Faisal Bhabha and Bruce Ryder.

Scott, who serves as associate dean, academic, and who co-created ATLAS in 2006, said ATLAS Agora was the first event of its kind for law school doctoral students and remains unparalleled in the international law school community.

“It was an Osgoode initiative, but we needed the five original partners to sign on,” he recalled in an email. “I am not aware of any similar doctoral consortium arrangement still.”

Due to complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Atlas Agora Summer Schools were cancelled in 2022 and 2020 and the 2021 event was held online.

Justin Thompson ’23 hopes a major scholarship he recently won will help inspire other Indigenous youth to reach for the stars.

The member of Nipissing First Nation near North Bay, Ont., who will officially graduate from Osgoode in June, was recently named a recipient of the $10,000 John Wesley Beaver Memorial Award. John Wesley Beaver was a former chief of the Alderville First Nation in eastern Ontario who served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War and rose to become a high-ranking executive at Ontario Power Generation. The scholarship is offered annually by Ontario Power Generation through Indspire, a national Indigenous charity that invests in the education of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people.

“Indigenous students want to see someone like themselves who is achieving things,” said Thompson. “So getting the award helps to show that anything is possible for Indigenous students and the sky is the limit.”

Thompson, who is the first in his immediate family to attend university, said the award also represents for him one more sign of hope that Indigenous youth and their communities can look forward to a brighter future after many generations of suffering under colonial oppression. His own great-grandmother, Agnes, was a residential school survivor.

In 2014, for example, his community enacted its own constitution, effectively supplanting the federal Indian Act, with its history of injustice. In addition, Nipissing First Nation is currently developing its own citizenship law, which will allow the community to decide who is a citizen and not the federal government. Alongside these developments, he added, the community is enjoying better times economically and is eagerly awaiting the results of the Restoule case, a landmark case currently before the Supreme Court of Canada that could see members of the Anishinaabe Nation in Northern Ontario win better compensation for the lands they agreed to share with the Crown under the 1850 Robinson Huron Treaty.

“We’ve seen all these exciting changes,” said Thompson. “So I want to play my part in helping my community become more sovereign and to exercise its rights of self-determination, loosening the grip of the Indian Act.”

Even as a teenager, he said, that desire drove his decision to become a lawyer. The scholarship has helped him to realize that dream, he added. In July, after completing his bar admission exams, he will begin articling in the Toronto office of Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP, one of Canada’s leading Aboriginal law firms.

As an aspiring Indigenous lawyer, Thompson said, Osgoode was his first choice of law school after he completed undergraduate and graduate studies at Trent University in Canadian and Indigenous studies. His graduate research there focused on the issue of Indigenous over-incarceration and the lasting impacts of the Indian Act related to the criminalization of Indigenous individuals.

“I came to Osgoode specifically for the Indigenous Intensive,” he said. “And the Indigenous faculty here have been an amazing source of support.”

The only program of its kind in North America, the Intensive Program in Indigenous Lands, Resources, and Governments (IPILRG) explores the legal issues related to Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous rights through the combination of a rigorous academic experience with challenging placements in Indigenous, Aboriginal or environmental law.

“The Intensive was my favourite aspect of law school,” said Thompson. “It was a bit disrupted by COVID, but (Professors) Amar (Bhatia) and Jeff (Hewitt) made sure we had all the support we needed.”

As an Indigenous law student, Thompson said, other highlights of his Osgoode experience included participating in the Kawaskimhon National Aboriginal Moot and his leadership roles with the Osgoode Indigenous Students’ Association (OISA).

“We took on a lot of important initiatives,” he said, citing in his third year the association’s ReDress Week event, its Moose Hide Campaign against domestic and gender-based violence and its Orange Shirt Day, which featured guest speaker and Osgoode alumna Kimberley Murray, the federal government’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.

Justice Patrick Monahan has become the third former Osgoode dean to be appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario, joining Justice Lorne Sossin and Supernumerary Justice James MacPherson.

Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti announced the appointment May 15. Justice Monahan replaces Justice I.V.B. Nordheimer, who became a supernumerary judge effective September 1, 2022.

An Osgoode graduate and, later, a faculty member for more than two decades, Justice Monahan served as dean of the law school from 2003 to 2009. He went on to become provost and vice-president academic of York University from 2009 to 2012 and deputy attorney general for Ontario from 2012 to 2017. He was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario in 2017.

Justice MacPherson was dean from 1988 to 1993, while Justice Sossin’s term stretched from 2010 to 2018.

The three former deans share the Court of Appeal bench with 10 other Osgoode graduates, including Chief Justice of Ontario Michael Tulloch ’89, the province’s first Black chief justice. Other graduates include Justice David Brown ’05 (LLM), Justice Steve Coroza ’03 (LLM), Justice William Hourigan ’90, Justice Alexandra Hoy ’78, Justice Peter Lauwers ’83 (LLM), Justice Sarah Pepall ’83 (LLM), Justice Gary Trotter ’90 (LLM) and Justice Benjamin Zarnett ’75.

Osgoode graduates have served at every level of court across Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada, where three graduates are current sitting judges: Justice Malcolm Rowe ’78, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis ’80 and Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin ‘14 (LLM), the high court’s first Indigenous justice.

A new $300,000 grant from the Ontario government will better equip Osgoode students to thrive in the province’s burgeoning knowledge economy.

The funding from Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON) will benefit the IP Innovation Clinic, Canada’s largest pro bono IP legal clinic and part of the law school’s comprehensive intellectual property and technology law program.

“With these resources, we can serve many more clients who do not have money to pay for expensive legal fees,” said Professor Pina D’Agostino, the founder and director of the IP Innovation Clinic. “We are also able to train many more law students to be IP and business savvy to protect key assets in the disruptive tech economy.

“The IPON funds,” she added, “will be invaluable to help scale the many successes of the IP Innovation Clinic working with Ontario’s startups.”

The grant will help create two new staff positions – an assistant director for the IP Innovation Clinic and a business development and commercialization manager for York University’s Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation (OVPRI). It will target researchers especially in the areas of artificial intelligence, automotive and medical technology.

The IP Innovation Clinic operates in collaboration with Innovation York, which also supports researchers. The Osgoode student volunteers who staff the clinic, known as Clinic Fellows, are supervised by lawyers from Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, Bereskin & Parr LLP and OWN Innovation. Guided by their lawyer mentors, Clinic Fellows provide legal information support to inventors, entrepreneurs and start-up companies and learn about common early-stage IP and business issues facing actors in the innovation ecosystem.

Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON) is a provincial agency that provides IP support and services directly to clients and postsecondary institutions to help Ontario businesses and researchers innovate and grow.

In a written statement, Minister of Colleges and Universities Jill Dunlop said this latest grant advances IPON’s mandate to provide Ontario post-secondary institutions and innovators with the funding, tools, knowledge and connections they need to harness the value of their IP.

Professor Pina D’Agostino has been named the inaugural vice-director of a pioneering, $318-million,  interdisciplinary research initiative geared to ensuring that cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are used for the benefit of humankind.

Announced April 28, the historic, seven-year project will also include six other Osgoode professors as members: Professors Valerio De Stefano, Karen Drake, Jeffrey Hewitt, Deborah McGregor, Roxanne Mykitiuk and Jonathon Penney.

The project, to be called Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society, will receive $105.7 million in federal government support through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), with $82.8 million of that going to York and $22.8 million to Queen’s University, its institutional partner on the project. York will contribute an additional $126 million over the life of the project, with further contributions committed by other collaborating partners.

Osgoode’s legal experts will join thought leaders from eight of York’s Faculties and three of Queens’ to focus on how emerging technology is transforming society and how the identified risks and benefits for humanity can be balanced.

Dean Mary Condon congratulated all seven Osgoode faculty members for their involvement in the project.

“The legal expertise, innovative thinking and leadership experience of our faculty members, led by Professor D’Agostino, will make a critical contribution to this important research,” she said. “As we confront the rapid rise of powerful and potentially disruptive technologies like AI, our legislative and legal responses will help determine if and how they contribute to society’s well-being.”

Associate Dean, Research & Institutional Relations, Trevor Farrow also welcomed the news. “Pina has been an innovator at Osgoode and York for years,” he noted. “It’s really great to see the work of all of these Osgoode faculty members getting so much well-deserved attention and recognition.”

D’Agostino was also recently appointed by the Ontario government to the board of directors of the Toronto-based Ontario Centre of Innovation, which supports startups and helps commercialize research developed by Ontario colleges, universities and research hospitals.

Internationally renowned neuroscientist Doug Crawford, the York Distinguished Research Professor in Neuroscience, has been appointed as the inaugural scientific director for Connected Minds, while Sean Hillier, director of York University’s Centre for Indigenous Knowledges & Languages, will serve as inaugural associate director.

A key structural component of the program is an Indigenous-led focus. The project will employ an overarching decolonization, equity, diversity and inclusion (DEDI) strategy and will feature a dedicated Indigenous research space on York’s Keele Campus.

Members of two national organizations spearheading efforts to improve access to justice in Canada and the United States met at the Supreme Court of Canada on April 27 to advance co-operation and renew their shared commitment to the cause.

The day-long event at the Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa brought together members of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice and the steering committee for Canada’s Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters – including Professor and Associate Dean, Research & Institutional Relations Trevor Farrow.

The action committee is chaired by Supreme Court of Canada Justice Andromache Karakatsanis. Chief Justice of Canada Richard Wagner serves as honorary chair.

“Both organizations are very active in working to improve and promote innovations in access to justice at the local level and through shared global partnerships and collaborations,” said Farrow, who also serves as chair of the Osgoode-based Canadian Forum for Civil Justice (CFCJ).

“During the meeting,” he added, “we explored shared interests and initiatives with the Office for Access to Justice, which was re-established under the administration of President Joe Biden.”

Farrow has been involved with the Action Committee on Access to Justice since it was established in 2007 by former chief justice Beverley McLachlin. He played a key role in the writing of its 2013 report, Access to Civil & Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change.

The report defined nine fundamental goals to improve access to civil and family justice in Canada, including addressing everyday legal problems, making the courts work better, improving funding strategies and building capability and innovation in the justice system.

“The action committee’s work has been at the centre of a growing movement around access-to-justice research and reform, which lines up directly with the UN’s sustainable development goals,” he said. “It’s regarded as a leading collaborative voice around the world in its efforts to promote people-centered justice.”

The mission of the U.S. Office for Access to Justice, according to its website, is to “help the justice system efficiently deliver outcomes that are fair and accessible to all.”

Known by the acronym ATJ, it works “within the Department of Justice, across federal agencies and with state, local, and tribal justice system stakeholders to increase access to counsel and legal assistance and to improve the justice delivery systems that serve people who are unable to afford lawyers,” notes its website.

Roojin Habibi is a research fellow at the Global Strategy Lab and a PhD student at Osgoode Hall Law School. Dr. Clare Wenham is an associate professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics.

Member countries of the World Health Organization are currently negotiating a new pandemic treaty in an effort to prevent a global health crisis like COVID-19 from ever happening again. But after the global mayhem and injustices of the pandemic, these negotiations are fast becoming a battleground for broader political tensions.

Nearly everyone would agree that egregious global inequalities were laid bare by COVID-19. While wealthy countries enjoyed timely access to quality vaccines, diagnostics and treatment, poorer ones were largely left to fend for themselves, even at the height of the global health crisis. To prevent another pandemic, countries need a new blueprint for global co-ordination and collaboration. The verdict is still out, however, on what that blueprint should look like.

Pandemic injustices have not only spurred demands for equity and solidarity in the WHO’s draft treaty, but also for countries with varying levels of development to accept “common but differentiated responsibilities,” or CBDR. While some entities see CBDR as the key to achieving health equity among the world’s nations, others, including Canada, view it as a divisive and unworkable concept in global health law. This impasse, reflected in the recently leaked version of the WHO’s pandemic accord, should not be an excuse for inaction. The stakes are too high and the need for solidarity is too urgent.

To be sure, the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is longstanding in international environmental law. It rests on four key ideas: First, that the world faces a common danger (i.e., climate change) that must be thwarted by collective efforts; second, that some countries have less capacity than others to fend off this danger; third, that some countries are more vulnerable than others to the effects of the danger; and finally, that some countries have a greater historical responsibility for the problem, mainly due to greenhouse gas emissions.

In a nutshell, the principle holds that those with greater culpability, capability, and less vulnerability must step up and take a more significant role in addressing the shared threat of climate change.

These same ideas may apply to pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response. New and emerging pathogens pose a common danger to the world. Poorer countries with weaker health systems are less capable of detecting these pathogens or mitigating their spread. These same countries, which often do not have robust health systems, are also more vulnerable to the impact of an epidemic or pandemic, as was evident during COVID-19. Their disproportionate outbreak vulnerability is, moreover, a product of historical trajectories, such as colonialism, and global neoliberal policies, such as structural adjustment programs (used, for example, by the International Monetary Fund as requirements for loans to developing countries) which eroded long-term investments in health systems. It seems only fair, then, that the countries that carved out these legacies should bear greater responsibility for their outcomes.

The current draft of the pandemic treaty references common but differentiated responsibilities in its preamble, guiding principles, and Article 4. For many countries in the Global South still reeling from the impact of COVID-19, these references do not go far enough, and further mainstreaming of the concept is needed. Conversely, for many high-income countries, it goes too far, as they argue that pandemics pose a universal threat to all countries, and all countries should bear equal responsibility for it.

Whilst wholly applicable to the global health space, tensions over the principle of CBDR could presage the unravelling of negotiations, which are already running behind schedule (the WHO first began considering this type of treaty in December, 2021). Perhaps countries are trying to force a circle into a square peg. Perhaps what they need instead are bespoke solutions and bespoke language adapted to the domain of global health.

The tenets of CBDR are not all that foreign to global health diplomacy. Seventy-five years ago, the world came together, with common aims, to address the differential challenges of achieving global health equity. In that spirit, they established the World Health Organization and recognized in its constitution that “unequal development … in the promotion of health and control of disease, especially communicable disease,” poses a “common danger.”

Today, as countries negotiate a new pandemic treaty, they must channel that same historical will to collective action. With just one year left to negotiate the agreement (a timeline stipulated by the World Health Assembly when first embarking on the treaty), it’s time for countries to say yes to working together with the greater aim of capacity-building for developing countries, and collective financing for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

Let us not squander this opportunity to build a shared understanding of principles that can guide us toward a safer, healthier, and fairer future.

(This article was originally published in The Globe and Mail on April 24, 2023.)