With only 11 hours to spare, student lawyers with Osgoode’s Community & Legal Aid Services Program (CLASP) have saved the parents of a York University student from family breakup and deportation to Colombia, where they faced potential danger or even death.

When 2L student Brandon Jeffrey Jang and 3L student Emma Sandri learned on Dec. 18 that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) had ordered the parents to board a Colombia-bound plane in Toronto on Jan. 18, they worked full out over the Christmas break to prepare about 1,000 pages of legal submissions to stop the deportation. Their request was initially denied by the CBSA, so they filed two supporting applications with the Federal Court, under the supervision of CLASP review counsel Subodh Bharati.

On Jan. 17^th, they appeared in person before a Federal Court judge in Toronto to make their case for the family, which has lived in Canada since 2009. The couple’s adult son is a student in York’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science and their daughter is set to graduate from Queen’s University and plans to study medicine. The son and daughter, who already have permanent residency status in Canada, faced being separated from their parents if the deportation had gone ahead as scheduled. The family breakup also threatened their academic careers.

The family expressed their gratitude in an emotional email.

“Thank you very much for all the effort that you put in our case,” the mother wrote. “I don’t have enough words to express what I feel right now and to say thank you. You are the best lawyers that Toronto has. Gracias, amigos! God bless you!”

Their joy was shared by the CLASP team.

“We were just so happy,” said Jang about hearing news of the successful stay application. “We’ve built a close connection with the family and we’ve all worked extremely hard on this case.

“That’s the amazing part about CLASP,” he added, “is that we’re able to take on these very unique, complicated cases that have a tremendous impact on people’s lives.”

Jang said the experience has confirmed his desire to pursue a career in immigration law – and this summer he will work for Toronto immigration law firm Green and Spiegel LLP.

Sandri said that preparing hundreds of pages of court applications in a month was a tremendous challenge, but learning that the family can stay in Canada as a result of their efforts was a huge relief and incredibly rewarding.

“It was difficult in terms of wanting to put out our best work in such a limited time span,” she explained, “and we really felt the pressure of the fact these people’s lives were possibly at stake.”

As they waited for the court decision, she added, “we both couldn’t sleep because we were thinking about what’s going to happen to this family and we were really stressing about that.”

Bharati said the condensed time frame and the last-minute court reprieve made the case more intense than many others that CLASP students have worked on. “This one was even more last minute,” he explained, “because it was hours before their deportation flight.”

In the wake of the court decision, Bharati said, the parents can now obtain work permits while they wait for the Federal Court to hear judicial reviews of previous decisions that rejected their applications for permanent residency status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

The father became a target of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the early 1990s when he became a candidate for the country’s Liberal Party, actively working to prevent youth from joining the paramilitary organization. After numerous threats and the suspected murder of his nephew by FARC members, the family fled to the United States. When they returned to Colombia seven years later, thinking it was safe, the mother was brutally raped and they fled again, eventually making their way to Canada. With the Colombian peace process currently faltering and FARC still a viable force, the family believes their safety could still be threatened if they return to the country.

In Canada, the parents have become actively involved in their Toronto community, volunteering during the pandemic, for example, to deliver food to house-bound, immune-compromised residents.

With the students’ time at CLASP nearing an end, Jang and Sandri expressed special appreciation for Bharati’s guidance and trust.

“All of our experiences at the clinic leading up to this case prepared us for the uphill battle we confronted when fighting for this family,” said Jang. “The result was a total team effort on everybody’s part and it was all worth it.”

For the third consecutive year, Osgoode Hall Law School has attracted more applications for its JD program than any other law school in Ontario.

According to recently released statistics from the Ontario Law School Application Service, a division of the Ontario University Application Centre in Guelph, Ont., Osgoode received 2,867 applications in 2023 for its 2024-2025 first-year class of approximately 300 students.

“I think one powerful thing that our admissions numbers show, it is that we are highly desired, highly sought after,” said Manager, Admissions & Student Financial Services Marcos Ramos Jr.

“But also,” he added, “when you look at our numbers closely, we have one of the most, if not the most diverse class of students within Canada.”

That impressive diversity, he said, is a reflection of the law school’s longstanding holistic admissions policy and a determined effort by its recruiters to create Canada’s most diverse law school. Law students educated in that environment simply become better lawyers, said Ramos Jr.

“Academics are essential,” he noted, “but what makes an excellent lawyer is your social skills, right? And we’re bringing to students an understanding of different walks of life – be it class, race, creed, so on and so forth.”

In recruiting students for Osgoode, he noted, the law school’s recruiters look beyond strong academic skills to each applicant’s life story and passions.

“Show me the passion!” explained Ramos Jr. “Show me how you want to contribute.”

Members of the fledgling Osgoode Sikh Students’ Association (OSSA) are playing a key role in bringing Sikh law students together at law schools across Canada.

The organization, which was launched in the summer of 2022, was the first of its kind in the country and will play an important role in improving members’ law school experience, said co-president Dalraj Singh Gill, a 2025 candidate in the JD/MBA program.

“The feeling of community in law school can make or break a student’s experience,” he said, “and allowing a Sikh student to interact and work with other Sikh students allows them to share experiences and memories that resonate amongst the group.”

3L student and co-president Tripat Kaur Sandhu and Karen Kaur Randhawa ’23 took the lead in establishing OSSA in 2022. Sandhu, Randhawa and Gill hope the initiative will enrich not only Sikh students at the law school, but the wider Osgoode community, the legal profession at large, and Sikh law students across Canada.

Gill said the organization is helping Sikh law students to remain rooted in the central principles of the Sikh faith, including the pursuit of justice and standing against oppression – ideals that are also relevant to the practice of law.

In addition, members hope the organization, through its various events and activities, will help improve understanding of the Sikh community at Osgoode and will provide a platform to advocate for Sikh issues and other racialized and minority communities at Osgoode.

“Our goal, among others,” said Gill, “is to tackle systemic barriers that prevent Sikh students and persons of colour from accessing the legal profession.”

From their beginnings with OSSA, Sandhu, Randhawa and Gill have actively reached out to Sikh law students across Canada, supporting them in their efforts to launch chapters at their own universities. Sikh law students’ associations followed at the University of Ottawa in January of 2023, Toronto Metropolitan University in February of 2023, the University of Windsor in May of 2023, Thompson Rivers University in the summer of 2023, and Queens University in the fall of 2023. For 2024, an SSA chapter is being eyed at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

“We are also hoping to get in touch with B.C. law schools,” said Gill, “and then later expand across to law schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and at Dalhousie in Nova Scotia.”

The chapters are not officially affiliated with the Canadian Association of Sikh Lawyers. But Gill said Sikh law students’ groups already established hope to create a Canada-wide network that will extend to alumni groups and professionals who have already established themselves in the legal field. A longer-term goal is to eventually host a national conference involving all SSA chapters.

Last year, the Osgoode Legal & Literary Society presented OSSA with its annual Student Club for Community Building Award.

It’s a clothing conundrum: In competitive careers like law, first impressions can be last impressions if prospects don’t present a professional image.

But for some law students, having the appropriate clothing for on-campus interviews or other formal occasions is not always a luxury they can afford.

That’s why the Osgoode Venture Capital Law Society (OVCLS) is holding its first-ever clothing drive in the Goodmans LLP Junior Common Room (JCR) on the first floor of the Ignat Kaneff Building on Jan. 17 from noon to 2 p.m.

“Outside of the financial burden associated with attending law school, interviewing and recruitment periods also bear less obvious but equally burdensome costs associated with the process,” said 2L student Emma Kirwin, director of communications for the OVCLS.

“The cost of formal business attire can create an additional financial barrier that often goes unacknowledged,” she added. “Alleviating this burden can help students feel more confident, prepared and less stressed during an already stressful and arduous period.”

Yianni Patiniotis, a second-year student in the JD-MBA program and the co-director of external relations for OVCLS, said the organization hopes the inaugural clothing drive will become an annual event that involves other Osgoode student clubs.

“During the recruit and at other times when we’ve been in corporate business settings, we’ve realized how fortunate we were to not have to stress too much about the business attire that we were required to wear,” said Patiniotis.

“If anything,” he added, “we had options to choose from. But we recognized that not all our peers and colleagues have that luxury.”

OVCLS is seeking donations of lightly used suit jackets, dress pants, dress shirts, belts, ties, dress socks and shoes, including heels or flats for women.

The organizers plan to donate the clothing collected to Dress for Success Toronto and Suits Me Fine at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Osgoode students who need business attire will need to access it through those charities.

He changed laws, he changed lives and, at times, he helped change the course of Canadian history.

The brilliant and multi-dimensional legacy of former Osgoode dean and professor Peter W. Hogg was celebrated Jan. 10 during a day-long conference that brought together some of Canada’s brightest legal luminaries, including three sitting Supreme Court of Canada justices, three current judges of the Ontario  Court of Appeal, six former Osgoode deans and other leading legal thinkers from Canada and abroad. The event took place online and in-person at Osgoode’s downtown campus.

In sometimes touching personal reflections, speaker after speaker shared stories of Hogg’s fundamental influence on their careers, the impact of his legendary textbooks, his masterful teaching and prodigious courtroom achievements, and his essential kindness as a person and proud family man. In perhaps his most important roles, he was husband to Fran and father to Anne and David.

Hogg, who joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1970 and served as dean of the law school from 1998 to 2003, died at the age of 80 in February 2020. Fran died two weeks later. After leaving Osgoode in 2003, he served as scholar in residence in the Toronto office of law firm Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.

In opening remarks, Dean Trevor Farrow marvelled at how Hogg, a native New Zealander, became his adopted country’s leading authority on Canadian constitutional law. On his arrival at Osgoode in 1970, he said, then-dean Gerald Le Dain thrust two of the most unpopular courses on the neophyte faculty member: constitutional law and tax law. Using his classroom notes, Hogg later wrote his authoritative textbook, Constitutional Law of Canada (Thomson Carswell, 2007), which was first published in 1977. Now in its fifth edition, the book has been cited well over 200 times in Supreme Court of Canada decisions – more than any other source. His other texts, Liability of the Crown (Carswell, 2011), based on his PhD thesis, and Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law (Carswell, 2022), are equally respected.

Hogg also provided invaluable counsel to clients on countless legal questions and cases – some of them of historical importance. In the 1990s, he advised Yukon First Nations in self-government negotiations with the federal and Yukon governments, helping them to win unprecedented sovereignty over their traditional territory. In 2004, in what he looked back on as one of his proudest achievements, he was lead counsel for the Canadian government in the Supreme Court of Canada’s same-sex marriage reference. And in 2008, he advised Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean during the prorogation crisis involving the Conservative government of then prime minister Stephen Harper.

In his Supreme Court appearances, Hogg was like a chess master, eagerly facing down nine opponents and defeating them all, said former Osgoode dean and Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Patrick Monahan, borrowing from an observation by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Ian Binnie. Justice Monahan described him as the most influential Canadian lawyer of the past half-century.

But Hogg was first and foremost a consummate teacher who was lauded and loved for his clarity and kindness. His student reviews in course evaluations were consistently “astonishing,” said former dean and Ontario Court of Appeal Justice James MacPherson.

In the classroom, said Osgoode alumnus and Chief Justice of Ontario Michael Tulloch, “It was impossible not to be transfixed by his brilliance, his humility and his ability to simplify complex areas of the law.

“He answered every question carefully and reflectively,” added Justice Tulloch. “Everyone was made to feel important. All the while, he did it with a dry wit and the embodiment of decency.”

Like most students, Osgoode alumna and Supreme Court of Canada Justice Andromache Karakatsanis said she became a diehard fan of Hogg’s after taking his first-year constitutional law course. After that, she signed up for every course he taught.

“Everything he started to teach, I took, and I learned that every area of the law can be fascinating,” she said during the panel session featuring Justice Karakatsanis and her Supreme Court of Canada colleagues Justice Sheilah Martin and Justice Mahmud Jamal.

“He really modelled intellectual curiosity,” she added. “That’s what makes the law to this day so deeply and enduringly important and interesting.”

In a lighter moment, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour remembered being intimidated by Hogg’s reputation when she joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1974 and noticing his New Zealand accent.

“I can remember our first conversation and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to make it,’” she recalled. “But then I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’s not going to make it either.’”

In the end, however, Hogg’s influence helped inspire the future course of her career, she said. “I’m absolutely convinced that he was the original cause of the development of my career into the judiciary,” she told the audience.

Several speakers also shared how Hogg played an instrumental role in launching and shaping their own careers in the law.

Osgoode Professor Jinyan Li, who is now a co-author of Hogg’s tax law text, remembered coming to Canada from China in 1985 and joining the Osgoode faculty as a young scholar and mother in 1999, when Hogg was dean. Soon after, he invited her to join him in writing a new edition of Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law.

“When I got the trust of the great Peter, it was such a validation of my potential,” she said. “I used the freedom he gave me liberally and he never complained. The only thing he said to me at one point was, ‘You have to make it simpler.’

“I became a better writer and also a better teacher, but most importantly I became a better citizen,” she added. “Peter has meant so much to me and I’m very happy I’m part of today’s event.”