It is no longer tenable to separate the study and practice of law from issues of mental health and wellness. Drawing from scholarship, clinical insight, and reflective experience, this course is premised on the conviction that mental
wellness, professional fulfillment, and academic insight can align, with productive and even transformative effects. The skills and capacities essential to thrive in law school and the legal profession—including personal reflection, healthy
relationships, values clarification, and boundary setting—are the very capacities that are strengthened by focusing on emotional and personal wellness. Using a model that marries the study of psychotherapeutic theory with experiential learning, the course equips students with skills and tools for life in the legal profession while cultivating critical and
personal insight to help students understand, navigate, and even constructively intervene to disrupt the mental health challenges endemic in legal education and the legal profession.
Combining practical skills-development and psychoeducation, the course will help students conceptualize their mental wellness from differing theoretical perspectives while deepening their awareness of self and others and fostering healthy relationships. The course will introduce students to topics such as: theories of psychological change; fostering awareness of self; the mind-body connection and the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise, and sleep;
deepening relationships to self, others, and at work; values clarification; effective communication of needs; coping mechanisms for stress & burnout; anxiety management skills; treatment options for depressive symptoms; resilience and meaning-making through adversity and trauma. With the support of assigned readings and other forms of class preparation, lectures, experiential exercises/practice, and small group discussions, the course will aim to create an
environment of trust and curiosity, and to foster a willingness amongst the students to bring their ideas, experiences, and emotions to the exploration of these issues, of the study and practice of law, and of themselves.
Course or Seminar Category: Health Law
Health Law
This seminar explores the dynamic and challenging field of health law, with a focus on practical issues. The course provides a survey of the legal framework and policy considerations underlying the cornerstone areas of health law, including: consent, capacity and substitute decision-making; mental health law; professional regulation and governance; medical malpractice; and health information privacy. Practical and topical issues will be explored in the areas of: elder law (issues in long-term care facilities, retirement homes); the law of medical assistance in dying in Canada; human rights in health care; hospitals and health care facilities (including physician privileges, employment issues and tensions between administrators, healthcare professionals and other stakeholders); the civil commitment system; reproductive health and surrogacy; and research ethics.
Typical seminars will cover substantive law including case law and statutes, as well as policy issues and examples of applications in practice. Students are expected to actively participate via class discussion and a class presentation. Guest speakers will provide unique perspectives on particular topics. Students will be asked to attend (in person or through electronic means) a hearing in the health law field and to reflect on that proceeding in a midterm written paper, and to explore and analyze an issue in health law through a major research paper. Through readings, class discussion and assignments, students will gain a foundation for a dedicated health law practice and an analytical framework for addressing health law issues as they arise in other practice areas.
Administration of Criminal Justice: Mental Illness
For the student wishing to practice criminal law, it is inevitable that they will encounter individuals with mental health issues. Studies
consistently show that at least 1 in 5 of all Canadians will be affected by a mental illness, either personally or through a close family member. The percentage of individuals with mental health issues increases when one looks at those charged with criminal offences and those in the correctional system. Accused persons with mental health issues raise difficult and complex issues for the criminal law practitioner, whether you are a prosecutor, duty counsel, defence counsel or a judge.
This seminar will develop students’ knowledge of forensic mental health issues throughout the criminal justice system. The course will examine the various legal issues that arise when an accused person living with mental illness comes into contact with the criminal justice system. Students will become familiar with Part XX.1 of the Criminal Code (Mental Disorder) and related sections, as well as the intersection between the Criminal Code and administrative law. The seminar will also afford students an opportunity to reflect critically on the various social, legal and ethical issues that arise as an individual with mental health issues goes through the criminal justice system, including the use of measures to divert persons away from or out of the criminal justice system.
The class will include lectures, guest speakers and class discussion. Students will also see how these statutory provisions arise in practice through a field trip (conditions permitting) to a specialized Mental Health Court or the Ontario Review Board.
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 end course, 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: Torts and Technology
Tort law is one of the law’s oldest areas of law, where one still encounters such Latin tags as “sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas” and “volenti non fit injuria,” where some cases printed in the casebooks are a century older than printed books. Can this area of law be of any relevance to the brave new world of large language models in the metaverse? Perhaps. In 2023, Epic Games, the studio that developed the enormously popular video game “Fortnite,” was sued in both Quebec and British Columbia on the charge that their game was too addictive. Snapchat was sued in the United States after a traffic collision for allegedly encouraging its users to earn a “badge” by driving at excessive speeds. The leading Canadian case on invasion of privacy did not involve snooping into someone else’s bedroom but accessing someone’s bank account details. Social media is full of defamatory statements, with chatbots increasingly adding their voice.
The course aims to see what tort law can do to deal with these issues. It will start by considering the impact of technology on our lives; it will then turn to the question of the interrelationship between technological change and legal (especially tort) doctrine: how technological change influenced doctrine and whether doctrine can affect technological change. A large part of the course will be devoted to examining the law of defamation, harassment, and invasions of privacy. These areas of law are not new, but new technology has given them greater urgency.
Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Governance
Established technologies like the internet and social and emerging ones like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, are transforming how we live, work, and interact. These changes raise a host of complex law, policy, ethical, and governance challenges in a range of domestic and global contexts, including internet censorship, the role and regulation of social media platforms, disinformation and online abuse, legal automation, algorithmic discrimination, privacy, surveillance, fintech, and cyber-warfare. Among the kinds of questions pursued in this course: Who is responsible when technology causes harms? Do we have to forego privacy for either technological innovation or security? How best to regulate social media, if at all? What can we do to prevent algorithmic discrimination and other forms of technology-enabled human rights abuse? What is “ethical” AI and how can we incentivize it?
These issues and other significant challenges and controversies in the law, policy, and governance of emerging technologies will be contextualized and brought to life via case-studies and real world scenarios involving issues that are often currently in the news and unfolding in real time outside the classroom in government, industry, and civil society. The course aims to introduce and provide a foundation in law and technology issues — to identify them, understand and think critically about them, and manage them in practice.
Disability & the Law
This course examines disability as a legal category with implications for the rights of persons with disabilities. Students will be introduced to alternative conceptions and theories of disability and impairment, and will examine how law constructs and regulates the lives of individuals with disabilities. Throughout the course we will examine statutory provisions and jurisprudence in different areas including: family, reproduction, death and dying, health, human rights, education, social assistance and economic supports to understand how disability is defined and regulated by law. This course analyzes and evaluates how law can best achieve the goals of social justice, inclusion and equality for individuals with disabilities.
This course offers in-class instruction in an interactive lecture/discussion/presentation format. Students are expected to read the assigned materials before class and to participate in class discussions. From time to time, guests will be invited to speak about their area of expertise and/or their experience of law and disability.
Environmental Law
This course is an introduction to Canadian environmental law. Major issues in environmental law are brought to life via guest lectures, videos, and exercises drawn from real-world environmental controversies. Course topics will include legislative jurisdiction and federalism, pollution regulation and regulatory instrument choice; climate change; toxic substances; environmental compliance and enforcement; economic instruments of regulation; public participation and environmental rights; judicial review of administrative action; common law environmental actions; environmental/impact assessment; endangered species law; review of environmental regulation in other jurisdictions, for comparison.
Additional principles and experiences will be gleaned from inherently related matters including indigenous issues, environmental sciences, natural resources and waste management, land use planning and brownfield development, and environmental case law. The practice of environmental litigation is addressed in the Willms & Shier Environmental Law Moot.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
• understand the jurisdictional framework and core principles of environmental law in
Canada;
• understand the sources of federal, provincial and local environmental law in Canada, including key legislation, regulatory instruments, and court decisions and assess the effectiveness of the environmental legal regimes
• understand the structure and operation of the main agencies and institutions that
play roles in the development and implementation of environmental law in Canada;
• evaluate developments in environmental law in Canada, with some comparison to
other jurisdictions; and
• examine, in depth, selected case studies of environmental law in Canada in order
to understand the political/economical/societal dimensions of environmental regulation.
Advanced Torts
The first-year tort law course covers the basic concepts of tort law by focusing on a small number of torts. Most of the course is dedicated to the tort of negligence. But tort law is more than negligence. This course is mostly dedicated to looking beyond negligence.
The course will begin by considering the relationship between tort and contract law, and specifically the possibility of limiting tort liability through contract. The course will then turn to the topic of tort liability of public authorities (including both negligence and other torts), which will examine the relationship between tort law and public law. The third unit will consider the various provincial regimes governing motor vehicle liability (with particular focus on Ontario law). Here, the focus will be on the relationship between tort law and insurance law. The course’s final unit will examine the economic torts (e.g., deceit, passing off, inducing breach of contract). Here the course will consider the relationship between tort law and some aspects of IP law and competition law.