The purpose of this course is to review and analyze the legal, ethical and practical issues in commercial and residential transactions respecting real property. Problems and remedies related to real estate transactions, including those involving real estate brokers and agents, sellers and buyers, mortgagors and mortgagees will be examined. Focus will be on the foundational areas of real estate law and their sources, including cases and statutes.
Course or Seminar Category: Business Law - Commercial and Contracts
Regulation Of Competition
Competition is good. In most industrialized countries, including Canada, this belief in the value of competition – that consumer and businesses prosper in a competitive and innovative marketplace – is a backbone of domestic and global economic policy. This belief is also the underpinning for the creation and enforcement of global and domestic competition/antitrust laws, including Canada’s Competition Act. The Competition Act seeks to maintain and encourage competition in Canada, primarily through public and private enforcement. Competition law, enforcement and policy feature prominently in political debate and in the press, particular due to concentration concerns and the vigorous enforcement of competition laws. This course aims to provide students with a basic understanding of competition law, enforcement and policy and the analytical tools necessary to assess (1) the impact of such on a firm’s behaviour and consumer well-being, and (2) how law can be applied to a firm’s business conduct. Key topics considered in detail in this course are: (1) all aspects of Canada’s Competition Act, including its reviewable practices and criminal offences; (2) the respective roles, investigative powers and decision making powers of the Canadian Competition Bureau, the Commissioner of Competition, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, the Competition Tribunal and the Courts; (3) mergers; (4) collusion among competitors; (5) abuse of dominance or monopolization; (6) deceptive marketing practices; and (7) private enforcement.
Why take this course?
Individuals and firms, both small and large, require advice to ensure their conduct does not violate the criminal and civil provisions of competition law, is in compliance with all regulatory requirements, and does not result in exposure to civil suits by competitors, customers and suppliers. As a result, a basic knowledge of competition law is useful to anyone whose practice will have commercial aspects. Practitioners whose work may benefit from some knowledge of competition law include:
· Corporate and commercial practitioners (whether in a transactional or litigation practice) regardless of size of firm;
· Plaintiffs’ side lawyers (including tort lawyers);
· Criminal defence lawyers;
· Intellectual property lawyers;
· Lawyers who advise clients in industries subject to regulation;
· In-house lawyers who counsel business people about the legality of business plans and communications in the regular course of business; and
· Government lawyers.
Securities Regulation
This is a four hour course in which we will deliver an overview of securities regulation in Canada from a practitioner’s perspective. We will review the Ontario Securities Act, regulations and policies, and will reference certain securities laws in other jurisdictions as well. We will study certain key securities regulatory concepts and how they intersect with today’s corporate finance markets. Our review will include: the meaning of terms such as “security”, “trade” and “distribution”; primary and secondary distribution of securities; prospectus offerings; private placement exemptions and resale rules; regulation of the trading markets including various stock exchange rules; capital pool companies and SPACs; continuous and timely disclosure; takeover bid legislation; mergers and acquisitions; primary and secondary market civil liability; and regulatory enforcement issues. Our goal is to have our students leave the course with a solid grounding in Canadian securities law as well as a good understanding of how these laws impact corporate finance in Canada.
Patents
This course deals with the law of patents in Canada. Patent law is one of the main headings of intellectual property law (along with copyrights and trademarks); trade secrets arise from a combination of contracts, equity and property law. The regime of patents protects inventions by granting inventors a limited monopoly of twenty years in exchange for disclosing the invention to society. The essential justification of the patent system is that it enables and rewards innovation. Arguments may also be made that patents afford a secure means by which inventions may be put to commercial use by investors. The course will examine the statutory basis of patent law in Canada, the judicial construction and interpretation of both primary and subsidiary regulations of Canadian patent law. The course will also locate developments in Canadian patent law in the context of international and regional transformations in the field. In this context, the course will explore contemporary controversies over the expansion of patent rights in biotechnology (from patenting mousetraps to patenting mice), and the shift from copyright protection to patent protection for computer programs. It is expected that at the course’s end, students would have a solid understanding of Canadian patent law as well as how international developments shape and influence Canadian patent law.
Law & Social Change: Corporate Responsiblity
This course provides students with perspectives into corporate social responsibility both as a governing mechanism for businesses as well as a form of business practice. The course will examine the theoretical paradigms surrounding the corporate objective and corporate accountability, international movements in corporate social responsibility led by organizations such as the OECD and the UN, as well as the legal frameworks in human rights protection and corporate risk management. The course will devote a significant proportion of time to the role of corporations in human rights and furthering social welfare and will discuss key critical perspectives on other social rights, including labour and the environment. This course will challenge students into viewing the role and responsibility of the corporation from perspectives beyond the traditional paradigm of shareholder primacy and is well placed to complement traditional corporate law and regulation courses as well as courses in international law.
Legal Drafting
This course is designed to help students develop practical skills in drafting legal documents. The focus will be on form and substance of formal agreements supporting corporate and commercial transactions as well as certain dispute resolution scenarios. Students review, analyze, prepare, present, and discuss various legal documents in corporate/commercial law and other substantive law areas. Students will work on selecting and adapting document precedents. The work will include class discussions and take-home assignments.The learning activities will include working with document precedents, reviewing, drafting, revising, and discussing various legal documents.The evaluation framework will include in-class exercises and take-home assignments
After completing this course, the successful student should be able to:
source a proper document precedent using Practical Law and O’Brien’s Encyclopedia of Forms
draft a clear and effective legal document
avoid common problems in drafting contractual terms (ambiguity, vagueness, etc.)
Legal Engineering: Tech & Innovation in Legal Service Delivery
The legal profession is at an inflection point. As artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies transform how people live, work, and interact with institutions, the delivery of legal services is being fundamentally rethought. This course explores how the legal industry can adapt—by learning from how other sectors have navigated disruption, and by developing a new mindset for engineering the future of legal practice.
This course invites students to consider how law can be redesigned to better serve clients, communities, and institutions in an era of rapid change. Drawing from real-world examples of innovation in business, healthcare, finance, and technology, students will explore how organizations have embraced transformation—and how similar strategies might apply to legal services. Through these parallels, we will challenge traditional assumptions about what lawyers do, how value is created, and what the future of legal work might look like.
Students will be introduced to foundational concepts in artificial intelligence and legal technology—not for the sake of technical fluency, but to understand their strategic implications. The focus will be on how these tools reshape client expectations, redefine workflows, and open opportunities for engineering new approaches to delivering legal solutions.
Central to the course is the application of design thinking: a user-centered, creative problem-solving methodology that will help students conceptualize new models of legal practice. Working in teams, students will identify pain points in legal service delivery and prototype innovative responses—combining legal knowledge with strategic and design-oriented thinking.
No background in technology is required – in fact, combining creative insights from a wide variety of disciplines is the focus of the course. What’s needed is a willingness to rethink the status quo, draw insights from beyond the legal field, and adopt a mindset of legal engineering—one that blends creativity, systems thinking, and a drive to build better legal futures.
Insurance Law
Are personal injury lawyers ambulance chasers? Are insurance companies only interested in denying claims and generating profits for their shareholders? There are many misconceptions about the insurance industry despite the important role that insurance law plays in regulating so many areas of our lives. Through this course, students will achieve a better understanding of the role that an insurance law lawyer plays in advancing and defending claims arising out of a motor vehicle collision, a slip and fall accident, or a long term disability claim. Through a case study approach, student simulations and by attending litigation events involving real litigants, students will experience first-hand the application of insurance law and procedure. This will also involve an analysis of the Rules of Civil Procedure, the Rules of the Licence Appeal Tribunal (LAT) and case law generated by the Financial Services Commission of Ontario, the License Appeal Tribunal and multiple levels of the Superior Court of Justice.
Students are required to participate in one of the following insurance litigation events throughout the term: an examination for discovery, a mediation session, a LAT case conference, a LAT Hearing, a pre-trial hearing and a day of trial. The course instructor will facilitate this process. Students will be required to prepare a paper of 5 pages at the end of their real world litigation experience.
International Commercial Arbitration
As the preferred means of resolving international commercial disputes, arbitration embodies the pursuit of excellence in dispute resolution. This course examines the theory and practice of international commercial arbitration from its foundation in the New York Convention and the parties’ agreement to the way that efficiency and fairness are achieved through innovation across the legal traditions. We look at arbitration from delivery of the notice of arbitration through constitution of the tribunal and design of the arbitral process on to the hearing, the award and recourse against it. Through a combination of lectures and discussions, guest presentations, and exercises based on mock scenarios, you will gain insight into a growing area of practice in Canada that is critical to the functioning of the world economy.
International Trade Regulation
This introductory course surveys the laws of international trade regulation from a Canadian perspective. The course focuses on the public international law and domestic public law regimes regulating the conduct of international trade to and from Canada, with a particular focus on the multilateral World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). An additional focus will be on some of the many preferential trade agreements relevant to the international trade of Canada such as the Canada-US-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, renegotiation of the NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Finally, this fall’s course will consider the nature of international trade regulation in a time of assertive unilateralism, including for reasons of national security and economic strategy, especially associated with the second Trump administration in the United States.
The course has an express objective of providing all students with an introduction to some basic policy aspects of international trade regulation drawn from economic theory, international relations theory, and international legal theory. No background is expected of students in terms of prior legal or other disciplinary knowledge (such as economics), just an interest in learning about some relevant policy tools from other disciplines.
Particular subjects for discussion include: the relation of international law to national laws of trade regulation; WTO/GATT treaties and institutions; preferential trade agreements such as the Canada-US-Mexico Agreement; trade in goods; trade remedy law such as antidumping duties; trade in services; trade and intellectual property; trade and investment. This course will also discuss important themes of contemporary international economic relations including the relation of trade to matters of national security and economic sanctions, and the relation of trade to social regulation, such as environmental or labour regulation.