Seven Osgoode professors are the recipients of 2023 York University Research Awards.

Professors Giuseppina D’Agostino, Valerio De Stefano, Philip Girard, Steven Hoffman, Poonam Puri and Dayna Scott were presented with their awards at a special celebration on campus April 12, along with Professor Emerita Mary Jane Mossman.

The annual awards, which honour the outstanding achievements of York researchers over the past year, were presented in part by York University President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton and Vice-President, Research & Innovation Amir Asif.

“Here at York, purposeful research defines us,” the two leaders said in a written message. “As the university prepares to take its research enterprise to the next level – as outlined in the strategic research plan currently in development for 2023-2028 – we know York’s biggest strength is its people, whose unwavering commitment, excellence and creativity is the key to pioneering new approaches to society’s most pressing, 21^st century challenges and advancing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.”

Osgoode Associate Dean (Research & Institutional Relations) Trevor Farrow commended the award recipients for their accomplishments.

“It was a real pleasure to honour and celebrate the exciting research that has been happening this year at York, and in particular the great work of our Osgoode colleagues,” he said. “Congratulations and thank you to all of them for their efforts and their very impressive achievements.”

D’Agostino was honoured with a York University Research Award for being named one of Canada’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers for 2022 by Canadian Lawyer magazine.

De Stefano was recognized for being named the Canada Research Chair in Innovation, Law and Society in June 2022.

Puri’s award was in recognition for receiving the Peter Dey Governance Achievement Award from the Governance Professionals of Canada in November 2022.

Girard was recognized for being presented with the David Walter Mundell Medal for excellence in legal writing from the Ontario government in March 2022.

Hoffman received a York Research Award for being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in September 2022 and for leading a successful, $2.5-million SSHRC Partnership Grant for research into a global framework for sustainable antimicrobial drug use and preventing the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria. Hoffman holds the Dahdaleh Distinguished Chair in Global Governance & Legal Epidemiology.

Mossman was awarded for being honoured with the Women’s Law Association of Ontario’s President’s Award in June 2022.

Scott was recognized for her work in leading a successful, $2.5-million SSHRC Partnership Grant for a six-year project exploring novel approaches to strengthening Indigenous jurisdiction and sovereignty over hereditary lands and waterways. Scott is cross-appointed with the Faculty of Environment & Urban Change and holds the York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy.

On March 30, the Vatican announced that it was repudiating the doctrine of discovery that has been used to justify the colonizing European powers’ assertions of sovereignty and land acquisition in the Americas. This doctrine was supported by a series of decrees, called bulls, issued by Pope Alexander VI in the 1490s. In the centuries since those bulls, the doctrine has been relied on by judges of the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States – as recently as 2005, by the latter. Hopefully, its dismissal by the Vatican will encourage today’s judges to follow suit.

The Church’s statement, which says that the doctrine of discovery “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church” and rejects the argument that the doctrine’s basis can be found in papal bulls from the 1450s and 1490s, is a significant step in the right direction. But it is only a step – and a problematic one at that, as its carefully worded repudiation of the doctrine provides a distorted vision of the historical context.

While it is true that these documents were issued to Portugal and Spain after they “discovered” West Africa and the Americas, the bulls nonetheless provided papal approval for their colonizing ventures. Instead of being decrees produced “in a specific historical period and linked to political questions” that “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith,” as the Vatican’s statement claims, they were in fact part of a deliberate, centuries-long Church mission to Christianize the whole world, by war and enslavement if necessary. This effort was actively pursued from the time of the first Crusade in 1095 up to and including the bulls authorizing colonization of the Americas in the 1490s.

And though the Church claims that the bulls were “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities,” the Vatican is wrong to depict itself as being so passive. The bulls empowered Portugal and Spain to further the Church’s Christianizing policy by forcibly acquiring the lands of Indigenous peoples and subjecting them to the control of the Catholic monarchs of these countries.

The 1455 bull Romanus Pontifex, which relates to West Africa, is one document mentioned in the statement. In that bull, Pope Nicholas V asserted that, as successor of St. Peter and vicar of Christ, he had a responsibility to Christianize the world. Toward this end, he authorized King Alphonso V of Portugal “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” seize their property, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

The 1493 bull Inter Caetera, authorizing Spain’s colonization of the Americas, starts by asserting that the highest-ranking work of the pope is that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” After praising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for recovering “Granada from the yoke of the Saracens” and for discovering lands previously unknown to Europeans, Pope Alexander VI’s decree purports to grant the Catholic monarchs “all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered,” west of a line in the Atlantic Ocean from pole to pole 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The stated purpose of this grant is religious – namely, to spread the Christian faith and convert the inhabitants of these distant lands.

This bull, unlike Romanus Pontifex, does not include powers of conquest and enslavement. But another 1493 bull, Eximiae Devotionis, did grant the Spanish monarchs all the rights and powers given to Portugal by previous bulls. Moreover, as is well known, the Spaniards viciously engaged in war and conquest, though more in pursuit of riches than conversion of the heathen.

It is thus disingenuous for the papacy to claim today that these bulls “were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers.” They were part of a deliberate religious policy aimed at subduing and converting non-European peoples to Christianity.

So while it is good that the Vatican has repudiated the doctrine of discovery, the Catholic Church is still not taking the responsibility it should for what was done to the peoples of Africa and the Americas. To be meaningful, Church statements should acknowledge its role in colonization, rather than provide distortions of history in an attempt to reduce its own responsibility.

(Published in The Globe and Mail, April 4, 2023.)

A new online application developed by the Refugee Law Lab at Osgoode Hall Law School could provide lawyers with the critical legal data they need to improve their odds of winning refugee protection for their clients.

The Refugee Law Lab Portal (RLLP), which launched March 27, provides easy-to-access legal analytics derived from all Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) decisions and judicial reviews of IRB judgments by the Federal Court.

Professor Sean Rehaag, director of the Refugee Law Lab, said the portal’s legal data can be used by lawyers to create “targeted” legal arguments, just as a doctor would use targeted medications to treat a patient’s unique symptom profile.

“When lawyers appear before decision-makers, they often don’t know who the decision-maker is until they walk into the room, so this can give them a quick way to understand some information about the decision-maker,” he said.

“If you know you have someone who is never going to grant refugee protection, then your job as a lawyer is to get a review,” he added. “By contrast, if you have someone who’s very sympathetic, you might just want to let the process roll through without interruption to keep the decision-maker on board.”

Rehaag said that subjective decision-making by refugee adjudicators is a reality, but he hopes data provided by the portal will help level the playing field for lawyers.

“From my perspective,” he said, “the key takeaway is that we need to have safeguards for this kind of decision-making to prevent the worst outcomes for refugees.”

“This can contribute to efforts to create those safeguards,” he added, “and help lawyers develop strategies to deal with the subjectivity of decision-making.”

Those worst outcomes would include the recent drowning deaths of eight migrants as they attempted to cross the St. Lawrence River into the United States.

The Refugee Law Lab plans to continue expanding the portal to provide additional information, including cases that decision-makers most often cite in their decisions. Rehaag said he also hopes that the legal data will help stimulate additional research into Canadian refugee law by other organizations.

Unlike high-priced legal data bases, Rehaag said, the Refugee Law Lab Portal is committed to keeping the information accessible, offering it for free and in easy-to-understand formats while at the same time protecting privacy.

“I think it’s a good example of taking academic funding for research and transforming that research so it’s more accessible and useful for practitioners,” he said. “Lawyers are not always comfortable engaging with data.”

The three-year portal project, which is currently in its second year, is funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario, while the Refugee Law Lab receives its funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Rehaag said most of the work in creating the Refugee Law Lab Portal has gone into compiling the data, including developing a sophisticated, cloud-based Internet scraping tool to continuously extract data from Federal Court dockets.

Despite ongoing controversy about the use of content warnings or so-called trigger warnings in university teaching, not one Canadian university is requiring its professors to provide them to students when teaching potentially sensitive content, according to a participant in a recent Osgoode panel discussion on the topic.

Michelle Miller Stafford, an assistant professor at Toronto’s OCAD University who conducted research on content warnings in the Canadian post-secondary context said most faculty members she and her research partner surveyed were in favour of providing warnings in order to respect the dignity of students – despite a 2015 policy statement by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) opposing them.

The panel discussion on content warnings in legal education and their potential impact on academic freedom took place via Zoom on March 13, 2023, and was moderated by Osgoode Professor Faisal Bhabha.

A full recording of the event is available here.

The CAUT statement, which is similar to one issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 2014, was re-approved in November 2022. It reads, in part, ““institutional policies that require or suggest that academic staff include trigger warnings as part of best practices in teaching interfere with the academic freedom of faculty to choose their own course materials and teaching methods.”

Panellist Benjamin Bellet, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University who has conducted research on content warnings, said a meta-analyis of studies that he and a colleague undertook concluded that the warnings do not change how people respond emotionally to potentially disturbing content, but can themselves cause short-term anxiety.

In response to warnings, he said, people generally do not take steps to avoid the content. But he said more research needs to be done on the effects of content warnings on survivors of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In welcoming the panellists, Dean Mary Condon said the topic is timely for all post-secondary institutions but has particular resonance for legal education.

“Much of the data that we teach in the context of our courses and our classes is data such as court cases, where there already is an adversarial nature to the matters that are under discussion,” she said. “So within that framework, it becomes quite important to think of the importance and the value of content warnings.”

The panel discussion was organized by Osgoode’s Standing Committee on Teaching and Learning, Osgoode’s Equality Committee and the office of the Associate Dean (Students). Rounding out the panel was Ummni Khan, an associate professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University and Kevin W. Gray, a lawyer and legal scholar who teaches at Fordham University and is the editor of the 2022 book Normative Tensions: Academic Freedom in International Education (Rowman & Littlefield).

A virtual learning tool co-developed by Osgoode Professor Stephanie Ben-Ishai is offering a glimpse into how technology could help transform the teaching of law.

Ben-Ishai, who developed the technology in partnership with Western University law professor David Sandomierski and a team of software developers, is already using the virtual learning tool to help teach contract law to her students. The project was supported by a $100,000 grant under the Ontario government’s Virtual Learning Strategy initiative.

“We’re trying to see if we can leverage technology to offer something better than the Zoom experience and to mimic the classroom, as well as the client experience,” she explained.

The audio-visual technology, called Teaching and Learning Law in the Metaverse, anticipates potential responses to questions and pushes students to come up with questions themselves, providing automatic feedback along the way.

Ben-Ishai said she and Sandomierski applied their significant experience in teaching contract law to optimize the technology and the learning experience for students. She said Sandomierski dedicated his PhD thesis to the ways contract law is taught. But the technology could be used to teach many other aspects of law, she added.

“It could work in different areas where the teacher is trying to achieve an experiential component,” she said.

“Most of law is about the lived experience,” she added. “We’re trying to move away from a fact-pattern based exam experience to have the student deeply understand the material, define the problems and figure out what resources to use.”

Ben-Ishai said the virtual learning tool does not make use of artificial intelligence because AI can’t teach students to conceptualize problems and address people’s lived experience.

After completing user testing and quality-assurance work in February, the research team submitted the virtual learning tool to the Ontario government’s eCampus Ontario site for open access and will continue to pilot the technology in the classroom.

Osgoode Dean Mary Condon welcomed the new technology, saying law students will benefit the most from Ben-Ishai’s innovative research.

“I am delighted to see colleagues with a deep understanding of their scholarly field create meaningful tools that enhance the student experience,” she said. “As contract law is a first-year subject, JD students will be introduced early to the possibilities this technology offers.”

Ben-Ishai said that she and Sandomierski have had a longstanding collaboration, but they began working in earnest on their virtual learning technology at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how they could add an experiential element to improve online learning.

“The metaverse has the potential to integrate creative curriculum development with experiential learning in a way that is not possible on Zoom or in a bricks-and-mortar institution,” they wrote in their proposal to eCampus Ontario. “As the metaverse evolves we will likely see transitions away from exclusively traditional forms of university and law school education.

“The project we are creating,” they added, “enables learners to pose questions, define their own goals, and collaborate with peers, their clients and professors as they acquire and build the knowledge base.

Ben-Ishai said that creating the legal virtual learning tool may have been difficult without provincial funding because of the high cost of developing such technology at the pilot stage.

Since launching its Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) in December 2020, the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities has invested $57 million in more than 395 projects led by the province’s universities, colleges and Indigenous institutes. The VLS is aimed at significantly expanding options for traditional and life-long learning through the accelerated use of both online and hybrid learning.

JD students showcased the depth of their research during a day-long symposium recently, presenting significant papers on issues ranging from migrant workers and child soldiers to Canadian companies that commit human rights violations abroad.

The March 23 event, hosted by the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, featured papers by six students in Osgoode’s juris doctor program and was held at Osgoode’s Helliwell Centre.

“I want to congratulate the students who are presenting their work today,” Associate Dean (Students) Karen Drake said in a written message.

“It is not easy to write a research paper that makes a significant contribution to a legal topic and to present your work publicly,” she added. “We are very fortunate at Osgoode to be able to benefit from such high-quality student research and from an event such as this that gives us access to that research.”

Kicking off the event, student Naomi Santesteban presented research exploring how the enactment of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program “has created a unique form of violence experienced by migrant workers that is not adequately captured by the country’s anti-human trafficking framework.” Acknowledging that violence can be multifaceted and that each person’s experience of violence is unique, Santesteban then analyzed the often-ignored racial dimensions of violence, as well as gender-based violence and bodily violence. She concluded by reflecting on the significance of the topic in the context of future social justice activism and the work of Parkdale Community Legal Services.

In her paper, student Anisha Nag explored how children accused of international crimes are sometimes denied refugee protection, arguing that children cannot meet the test for exclusion under Article 1F(a) of the Refugee Convention because their actions cannot be described as voluntary. Making a defence of infancy available to children, she argued, would accord with Canada’s international legal obligations towards children.

Student Madeleine Worndl explored in her paper how lawmakers in Canada could make Canadian corporations more accountable for human rights violations carried out in foreign jurisdictions by enacting due diligence provisions within Canadian federal and provincial corporate statutes to require corporations to prevent and account for human rights impacts in their global operations.

The symposium’s afternoon session focused on research related to criminal law and access to justice. In the fourth paper of the day, student Alicia Cooke presented research focusing on the predominant interrogation method used by Canadian police, known as the Reid Technique, arguing that it has a propensity to elicit unreliable confessions leading to wrongful convictions and should be entirely prohibited.

In his paper, student Jonathan Carlson drew on the experiences of defence counsel and access-to-justice research to shed light on the barriers to justice that continue to be faced by Indigenous persons being sentenced, resulting in their continuing overrepresentation in the justice system.

Finally, in her paper, student Joeley Pulver explored the access-to-justice crisis faced by self-represented prisoners, looking at the lack of resources available to them and the lack of regulated standards of access in Canada. She concluded with a series of recommendations on how federal, provincial and territorial legislators could increase access to justice for self-represented prisoners.

The students’ papers will be published in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, which has provided an interdisciplinary forum for legal innovation and provocative approaches to legal knowledge since its inception in 1958.

All the business around Justice Russell Brown’s leave from the Supreme Court of Canada has many different dimensions and implications. Apart from the question of whether he will or should return to the Supreme Court, one issue that is occupying commentators is what this means for the handling of cases presently before the court.

Differences of opinion focus on whether the Supreme Court should sit as eight (and allow for the possibility of a tied vote) or as seven (and face the dilemma of whom to leave out). This is a pressing issue, especially in regard to an important case to be heard this week on federalism and environmental legislation.

However, within and behind this debate is the much more fundamental matter – the relation between constitutional law and politics. In particular, whether sensitive and contested issues of federalism are being decided in line with the dictates of constitutional law or by reliance on partial political stances and values.

The central bone of contention seems to be that the Albertan Justice Brown is considered to be a strong proponent of provincial rights and was almost certain to rule against the constitutionality of the federal government’s wide-ranging legislation to tackle pollution problems. So, if there is to be a bench of seven, the identity and federalism leanings of the justice who sits out the case is treated as a matter of some delicacy and importance.

The premise on which this debate is based is troubling for those who maintain that constitutional law should and must trump constitutional politics. Traditionally, it is usually insisted that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court rests on its capacity to transcend political contestation by acting with measured, rational and non-ideological level-headedness. Judges deal in principles, not politics.

The received wisdom is that, while there are underlying and sharp ideological differences between different governments about climate change and the best response to be made, there exists a deeper and more unifying commitment to the idea that the Canadian Constitution stands apart from prosaic politics. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his provincial colleagues play politics and get their hands dirty, Chief Justice Richard Wagner and his puisne associates are expected to keep their hands clean of any political dirt.

But the general acceptance that Justice Brown is pre-disposed to be pro-provincial and that some of his colleagues, including Chief Justice Wagner, are more than likely to be pro-federal has massive ramifications. Any notion that these judges are somehow neutral and impartial goes out the window. They are involved in the same ideological game as their political counterparts.

The fact is that, while courts may well be impartial between the competing claims of the present federal and provincial governments in terms of party-politics, they are not and cannot be impartial as between competing visions and versions of federalism. Although viewed as being more technical than political, federalism disputes involve deep-seated and contested accounts of governmental arrangements, social values, institutional power and democratic accountability.

So, while courts and legislatures may have different discourses, different styles and different legitimacies when talking about a fair allocation of governmental powers between the federal and provincial governments, they are no less political for that. In other words, judges can hide their views, but they cannot avoid making political choices.

The whole debacle over Justice Brown’s absence draws attention to this state of affairs. Perhaps inadvertently, but still revealingly, the ensuing debate has demonstrated that the judges do have politics and that, more significantly, they do rely on them to animate their decisions and reasonings. Otherwise, why would it matter who sits and who doesn’t?

Both judicial sides of the federalism debate can claim support for their positions; the doctrines of constitutional law are so capacious, so inconsistent and so accommodating in their reach and substance that they can confer a necessary baseline of legal validity on either a pro-provincial or pro federal approach. Understood this way, the Rule of Law becomes little more than the Rule of Five; the stance that garners the support of five judges wins.

None of this is to suggest that the judges act in bad faith or are decidedly manipulative in fulfilling their judicial duties. It is that there is no way to engage with and resolve federalism issues in a way that can claim to be acting in the neutral and detached way that the judges and their traditional allies suppose. Constitutional law is politics. And Canadians need to appreciate that.

(Published in the Globe and Mail, March 20,2023)

Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti has told students at Osgoode Hall Law School that it will take the next generation of law students and Canadians to continue the work of reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous peoples.

True reconciliation will require a transformation in Canadian law and the way Canadians think, he said in a special address to Osgoode students on March 27.

“I think all of that is the future and all of that is you,” he said. “Derooting colonialism or stripping away the layers of colonialism will take time and will be a constant effort, but it can happen,” he added.

“That’s my challenge to you,” he said. “You will have to work with each other so claims of justice can be fulfilled.”

Lametti urged the law students to look for opportunities to lead and paid tribute to Osgoode alumni who have had an impact on his life and Canadian society, including deceased Supreme Court of Canada Justice Peter Cory ‘50, for whom he clerked, Federal Court Justice Avvy Go ’99 (LLM), Shalene Curtis-Micallef ‘95, who was appointed as deputy minister of justice in February 2023, and Michael Tulloch ‘89, who was appointed Chief Justice of Ontario in December 2022.

“No doubt their principles and perspectives can be traced back to their days at Osgoode,” he said. “I’ll put aside my McGill bias,” added the former McGill University law professor, “and acknowledge that this law school has been forming great legal minds for 134 years.”

Lametti, a native of Port Colborne, Ont., who was elected to represent his Montreal riding in 2015, said he never expected to be nominated as a federal election candidate, much less win his seat.

“So I would say to you, watch out for those doors as they open,” he urged the students. “Keep an eye open for how you can lead because you can have a big impact once you get there.”

The attorney general restated the federal government’s commitment to implementing its United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, with its most recent step coming March 20 with the release of a draft action plan.

“I think the declaration has the potential to be one of the single most transformational points in what I think could be the refounding of the country,” said Lametti. “But in order to get there, it’s going to take a great deal more work than has already been done and a stripping away of the layers of colonialism that have been imposed on Indigenous peoples.”

He also vowed to continue supporting the work of Kimberly Murray ‘93, the federal government’s special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools.

He said he is also pushing ahead with work to create an independent Canadian Criminal Cases Review Commission, which he hopes will help correct the over-representation of Indigenous people and other marginalized Canadians in the justice system. Similar independent review commissions exist in the U.K., Scotland, New Zealand and some U.S. states.

In taking questions from the audience, Lametti agreed that the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) by the federal government will require the adoption of Indigenous legal systems as part of a multi-juridical framework.

“We have to recognize there are more than two legal systems in this country,” he said. “I’m hoping we get to a point where we truly become legal pluralists and different people will be governed by different legal systems at the same time – and sometimes multiple legal systems at the same time.”

He also expressed the federal government’s commitment to investing more in Indigenous-led restorative justice initiatives and in improving the nationwide reach and quality of Gladue sentencing reports, which Canadian courts can request before sentencing an offender who is Indigenous.

At the end of the session, Lametti posed for photos with students, including members of the Osgoode Indigenous Students’ Association and Lori Mishibinijima, Osgoode’s program manager and special advisor, Indigenous & reconciliation initiatives.

Fourteen Osgoode students have been honored with 2023 Dean’s Gold Key Awards for their exceptional contributions to the law school.

The awards, which were presented at a special event on March 22, are given every year to graduating students who have demonstrated remarkable leadership, commitment and enthusiasm through their participation in extra-curricular activities, peer mentorship, law school or university governance, clinical education, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal or other endeavors.

“I’m continually inspired by the achievements and the character of our students at Osgoode,” said Dean Mary Condon. “These are amazing individuals and they give me so much hope for the future of our profession.”

The following is a list of recipients with a brief summary of their achievements taken from their nomination forms:

Natalie Bravo showed exceptional leadership as a Deans’s Fellow, research assistant, co-president of Outlaws, editor at the Journal of Law and Social Policy, and in her clinical programs (the Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (ADIP) and Feminist Advocacy).

William Brown restarted the Osgoode Athletic Association, revived two Osgoode intramural hockey teams and its inter-law school team, organized the Osgoode Charity Classic and was a legal intern at Animal Justice.

Annika Butler is a dedicated leader with the Osgoode Indigenous Students’ Association, worked for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General in the Crown Law Office, Criminal Division, during her IL and 2L summers, and was a member of the Intensive Program in Indigenous Land, Resources and Governments.

Courtney Cameron has held various leadership positions with the Osgoode Legal & Literary Society, including president, and has dedicated immense time and effort to ensuring a positive experience for her classmates.

Aya Fahmi has been a student caseworker at the Investor Protection Clinic, a workshop facilitator for Law in Action Within Schools (LAWS), a class representative in Student Caucus for three years, co-founder and co-president of Osgoode’s Middle Eastern Law Students’ Association (MELSA), a Dean’s Fellow for Public & Constitutional Law, and a volunteer with the Dean’s Scribe Program.

Rotem Fellus has been a volunteer and deputy co-ordinator with Pro Bono Students Canada, co-president of the Osgoode Tax Law Association, a leader with the Jewish Law Students’ Association, a caseworker with Community Legal Aid & Services Program (CLASP) and a volunteer with the Osgoode Peer Support Centre and the Competition Law Society.

Viktor Hohlacov has been a representative with Student Caucus, a student member of several committees, including Osgoode’s Digital Innovation Committee, co-founder of the Osgoode Securities Law Association, an active leader with the Osgoode Business Law Society and a staff writer with Obiter Dicta.

Annie Hu has been co-president of the Asian Law Students’ Association, vice-chair of Student Caucus, a volunteer with Pro Bono Students Canada, and a senior division leader, board member, caseworker and interpreter with CLASP.

Mona Karimi has held various leadership positions with the Osgoode Muslim Law Students’ Association, including co-president, has been a caseworker with the Osgoode Venture Capital Clinic, a student clerk with Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada, a volunteer for the Artists’ Legal Advice Services and a board director with Waveland Canada.

Frank Nasca has been one of Osgoode’s top mooters, a research assistant, a Dean’s Fellow, an enthusiastic participant in the Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (ADIP) and the author of an award-winning paper on the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

Jaylene Olson has been a representative with and chair of Student Caucus, a caseworker with the Osgoode Investor Protection Clinic and a significant contributor to the Academic Planning and Policy Committee of Faculty Council.

Melissa Paglialunga has been the student recruitment coordinator for the Office of Recruitment & Admissions, JD program, for three consecutive years, executive producer of Mock Trial 2022, co-president of the 2022 JD/MBA conference committee, a secretary of Legal and Lit, a caseworker at two clinics (Mediation and Business), an active participant in mooting, and a contributor to the LAWS program.

Bunisha Samuels has served in leadership and fundraising roles with the Osgoode chapter of the Black Law Students’ Association, including president, a key contributor to the Raise the Black Bar initiative, a student caseworker with Parkdale Community Legal Services, associate editor at the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, a research assistant and active mooting participant.

Christina Tassopoulos has been a representative for Student Caucus, secretary for Legal & Lit, co-president of the Osgoode Peer Support Centre and co-chair of Orientation Week.

The books delve deeply into some of the hottest legal issues of our time, ranging from disasters and disabilities to the global access-to-justice crisis, algorithmic management of employees and the law and emotions. One is a monumental history of Canadian law, another a book of poetry. And that’s just a small sampling of the rich research that Osgoode professors have undertaken since the start of the pandemic.

“These recent faculty books, which cover a range of topics, are an impressive collection of thought provoking and inspiring scholarship,” said Associate Dean (Research and Institutional Relations) Trevor Farrow.

In a special book launch event March 21 at the law school, faculty, staff and students celebrated the release or upcoming publication of an impressive 14 books written or edited by Osgoode professors since January 2020 – some under leading global imprints like Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury and Edward Elgar Publishing.

“Getting together with colleagues to discuss recent publications was a real pleasure,” Farrow added. “People are excited about the research that’s happening at Osgoode, and it was fascinating to discuss and celebrate these accomplishments.”

Here is a brief summary of the books, in order of most recently published:

May 2023 – Jennifer Nedelsky, Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press): Part-Time for All offers solutions to four pressing problems: inequality for caregivers; family stress from the demands of work and care; chronic time scarcity; and policymakers who are ignorant of care and caregivers with little access to policymaking – the care/policy divide. Only a radical restructuring of both work and care can redress all of these problems.

March 2023 – Barnali Choudhury, The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Edward Elgar Publishing): This comprehensive commentary provides an in-depth analysis of each of the 31 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, as well as the 10 Principles for Responsible Contracts. It engages in both a legal and contextual examination of the principles alongside their application to real world practices at both the domestic and international levels.

February 2023 – Allan Hutchinson, Hart, Fuller and Everything After: The Politics of Legal Theory (Bloomsbury): The book criticizes and abandons the analytical project that law professors Lon L. Hart and H.L.A. Fuller set in motion in 1957 and that still informs most legal theory today. Instead, it insists that not only law but also all theorizing about law is political in all its derivations, dimensions and directions.

November 2022 – Philip Girard, A History of Law in Canada Volume II: Law for the New Dominion, 1867-1914 (University of Toronto Press): In this latest volume of their seminal history, the authors chronicle how Canada, as a new state on the global stage, tried to use law to weld into one nation several disparate settler colonies established on Indigenous lands. But unity was elusive.

November 2022 – Kent McNeil, Voicing Identity: Cultural Appropriation and Indigenous Issues (University of Toronto Press): Written by leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, Voicing Identity examines the issue of cultural appropriation in the contexts of researching, writing, and teaching about Indigenous peoples. This book grapples with the questions of who is qualified to engage in these activities and how this can be done appropriately and respectfully.

July 2022 – Valerio De Stefano, Your Boss Is an Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence, Platform Work and Labour (Bloomsbury): What effect do robots, AI and online platforms have on our work? Using case studies and examples from across the E.U., the U.K. and the U.S., this book provides a compass to navigate this technological transformation, as well as the regulatory options available, and proposes a new map for the era of digital advancements.

February 2022: Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford University Press): The book contends that there is no such thing as a “disaster” outside of rituals of legal, administrative and scientific contestation through which such occurrences are morally distinguished from the rhythms of everyday life. Disasters result from the same practices of knowledge-making and violence by which institutions and people develop state-like power to define and defend the social order.

August 2021 – Odelia Bay, Law and Disability in Canada: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis Canada): This text offers a comprehensive overview of law and disability issues in Canada. The authors discuss persons with disabilities and their interactions with the law as a holistic phenomenon that requires knowledge of and engagement with different areas of law such as workplace accommodation, income security, criminal justice, inquests and specialized courts.

April 2021 – Emily Kidd White, Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (Elgar Online): As this collection demonstrates, research on law and emotions has become a thriving field in recent years, providing vigorous and varied investigations into how emotions influence and are influenced by legal contexts. This scholarship is richly interdisciplinary, melding contributions from psychology, history, sociology, literature, critical theory, neuroscience and other fields.

December 2020 – Gus Van Harten, The Trouble with Foreign Investor Protection (Oxford University Press): Governments are rightly discussing reform of investment treaties and the incredibly powerful system of “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) on which they rest. At their core, ISDS treaties are flawed because they firmly institute wealth-based inequality under international law. This book reveals a shady world of investment protection where the costly disciplines of globalization get enforced.

December 2020 – Benjamin Geva, International Negotiable Instruments (Oxford University Press): This text on conflict-of-law rules applicable to negotiable instruments challenges their isolation and encourages their assimilation with mainstream law theory governing contract and property.

October 2020 – Kate Sutherland, The Bones are There (Book Hug Press): A collection of poems that explores the extinction stories of multiple animal species (Steller’s Sea Cow, the Thylacine, the Golden Toad) and the implication of humans therein. It’s poetry by way of collage, drawing on such disparate sources as ships’ logs, scientific manuals, trial testimony and fairy tales.

September 2020 – Trevor Farrow, The Justice Crisis: The Cost and Value of Accessing Law (UBC Press): This collection of new empirical research addresses the extent and cost of unmet legal needs, exploring issues such as funding, social exclusion, the value of new pathways, fee structures, justice services beyond courts and lawyers, and the need for a culture change within the justice system.

January 2020 – John McCamus, An Introduction to the Canadian Law of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (Carswell): A concise and accessible account of the law of restitution or unjust enrichment, constituting a third branch of the law of obligations in Canadian common law jurisdictions.