Neurotechnology (NT) comprises various invasive and non-invasive methods, systems and devices to connect directly to and monitor and/or modulate the human brain and nervous system. These technologies have far-reaching implications across society, and are particularly poised to define, change, predict and control human abilities and impact individual rights. This interdisciplinary course explores the convergence of neurotechnology, human rights, and legal frameworks in the case of neurotechnological interventions. Students will examine theoretical frameworks, practical applications, ethical implications, and legal considerations of neurotechnology. The course integrates neuroscience and neuroethics concepts, signal processing techniques, machine learning applications, comprehensive human rights analysis, evolving legal framework developments, and comparative domestic regulation and existing international frameworks. More generally, the course will bring a number of diverse fields of law such as a rapidly moving ecosystem of commercial brain data usage, privacy law, disability rights, and international regulatory frameworks for emerging technologies into a conversation.
Course or Seminar Category: Technology and the Law
Legal Values: Artificial Intelligence (Discrmination & Surveillance)
This seminar will explore in depth the many ways in which modern computing systems — including the data they ingest, the decisions made by the folks who develop them, and their myriad and nearly ubiquitous applications — may enable, encourage, or prevent societal discrimination and surveillance capitalism of various types. Students will learn how algorithms and artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems work, how such algorithms and systems may provide differential treatment and/or outcomes for different populations, and how they may invade privacy and cause other harms to people. Students will also consider the potential legal/regulatory, technical, and social/policy interventions that could ameliorate the harms caused by such algorithms and systems and will weigh the advantages and disadvantaged of each.
At the end of the seminar, students should be able to (i) discuss with colleagues and others the positive and negative consequences of various current AI innovations, and (ii) suggest different approaches to address systemic bias and surveillance capitalism — including legal/regulatory or social/policy changes, as well as technical solutions — and explain why certain of these approaches might or might not work in specific circumstances.
Directed Reading: IP Innovation Clinic
The IP Innovation Program was established in 2019, to support the work of the IP Innovation Clinic, founded in 2010 by Prof Pina D’Agostino (now the Hon. Justice D’Agostino of the Federal Court). The IP Innovation Clinic is a year-round, needs-based innovation-to-society intellectual property (IP) legal clinic operated in collaboration with Innovation York/the Office of the VPRI and supervising law firms Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, Smart & Biggar, Own Innovation, and RealizeIP. Under the guidance and mentorship of the Clinic Director, Clinic Associate Director, and Supervising Lawyers, JD students provide one-to-one legal information services (not legal advice) to researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and start-up companies to assist with the commercialization processes. Through this hands-on practical experience, law students learn about common early-stage IP and business issues facing actors in the innovation ecosystem.
Under the IP Innovation Program rubric, students can work in the clinic for the academic year for course credit, under the supervision of the IP Innovation Clinic team and Supervising Lawyers. Enrolled students can continue clinic work during the summer term on a volunteer basis.
Enrolled students spend approximately 6 hours/week throughout the year on client file-related work and clinical projects. The clinical work includes managing at least 2 client files, conducting intake meetings, which lead to specific work that can include: performing patent searches, reviewing patent specifications, performing freedom-to-operate and clearance searches, reviewing IP licensing transactions, assisting with preparing and filing provisional patent applications, drafting memos, conducting legal research, and other tasks as assigned and approved by the supervising lawyer(s). In addition to client file-related work, enrolled students also work on clinical projects, such as providing IP awareness and education to the clinic clients and the community, including presentations and/or workshops about the basics of IP law, commercialization, licensing, IP strategy, etc.
In addition to working approximately 78 hours per semester on client file-related work and Clinic projects, enrolled students attend pre-scheduled, mandatory 2-hour monthly seminars with the Clinic Director and/or Associate Director (as well as staff and Clinic Coordinators and sometimes guests and/or participating Supervising Lawyers) and attend other informal meetings as necessary. The purpose of the seminars is to deepen the students’ understanding of IP in a practical context, the role of IP in commercialization, and IP skills and strategies. Students can also rotate on presenting and discussing assigned reading materials on select topics to enhance their collective learning and reflect on their clinical work in a wider community legal IP context.
Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal
The Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal publishes peer reviewed scholarly works, book reviews, and recent development dispatches, focusing on comparative and international labour law issues. Students enrolled in this seminar may receive credit to the value of four credit hours each academic year and not more than eight credit hours in total. Students must enroll in the Journal for at least two semesters in order to earn credit. Meetings are generally held every other week throughout the fall and winter semesters.
A.I. and Technology in Legal Practice
This micro-course provides an in-depth look into the evolving role of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field. It explores how these advancements are transforming legal practices, from automating routine tasks to providing sophisticated analysis and decision-making support. Students will gain hands-on experience with key platforms
available on the market, enhancing their technical proficiency. The curriculum covers machine learning, data systems, legal workflow automation, and a high-level overview of AI technology, preparing students for a modern legal
environment, focusing on technical skills and knowledge to address today’s challenging issues around AI.
Learning Objectives:
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of legal tech tools.
• Apply legal technology effectively in various legal contexts.
• Recognize the ethical implications of technology in legal practice.
• Enhance efficiency and accuracy in legal tasks through tech solutions.
Legal Values: Human-AI Systems, Judgment, and Legal Practice
This course examines human-AI systems in legal work. The required classroom core will focus on human-AI decision-system failure; legal hallucination, reliability, and verification; Canadian professional responsibility; confidentiality, privilege, privacy, and data governance; court-facing work and candour; e-discovery and document review; and law-firm and legal-department governance.
Through lectures and structured discussion, students will study automation bias, overreliance, selective adherence, opacity, cognitive forcing, legal fluency, source-grounded error, technological competence, supervision, billing, vendor due diligence, audit trails, and incident response. Guided human-AI workflow analysis will require students to examine concrete legal tasks, such as AI-assisted research, citation checking, drafting, privilege review, transcript summarization, discovery document review, court filings, and client advice, to identify where reliance can become unsafe and what controls are required.
The course will distinguish generative AI from technology-assisted review, predictive coding, and continuous active learning, while considering what e-discovery’s traditions of validation, proportionality, defensibility, sampling, and auditability can teach lawyers about AI-assisted work. Canadian law society guidance, court notices, judicial materials where relevant, e-discovery principles, and verified Canadian cases will anchor the course. U.S., U.K., European, and international materials will be used comparatively and with attention to jurisdictional limits. Public decision-making, judicial AI use, access to justice, legal education, and comparative regulation will be introduced as research pathways rather than treated as comprehensive course coverage.
No technical background is required. The course is designed for law students who need to understand AI-assisted legal systems as lawyers.
Securities Regulation
This is a four hour course that focuses on foundational and detailed coverage of the Ontario Securities Act, with the goals of both ensuring good understanding of the most important requirements of securities law, as well as the underlying policy objectives that those rules are intended to achieve. There will be reference to other provincial or international regulation where appropriate for comparison. Included in the detailed coverage are the definitions of key securities regulatory concepts such as “security”, “trade”, and “distribution”; requirements for primary and secondary distribution of securities; prospectus disclosure; exemptions and resale rules as well as recent changes here; continuous and timely disclosure obligations with particular reference to prohibitions on insider trading; mergers and acquisitions with particular reference to takeover bid legislation; primary and secondary market civil liability; enforcement law and policy.
Legal Information Technology: Data Analysis & Coding for Access to Justice
In this course, students will engage with law as data, using new legal technologies that promise to shift how lawyers practice in coming years, with a particular emphasis on exploring implications for access to justice. The aim is to examine not how the law regulates new legal technologies, but rather how these technologies can or should be used by legal professionals to advance the rights and interests of marginalized groups.
The course will use a hands-on experiential pedagogy. That is, students will engage directly with new legal technologies – including by completing several small coding projects involving legal data analysis. In addition to exploring these technologies, students will critically reflect on their ethical, professional, social, and economic impacts, focusing on implications for low-income and otherwise marginalized groups.
No prior coding experience is required. The course recognizes that students may bring a range of prior skills and knowledge. Both learning and evaluation have been designed to allow students who are beginners to coding and legal data analysis opportunities to successfully explore a new area, while also allowing students who already have relevant technical skills – as well as students who want to push their skillsets further – to take on more advanced projects. As such, participation is weighted heavily and final projects can be completed with limited coding.
The course involves both synchronous and asynchronous components. After an initial synchronous introductory class, the first half of the course will be delivered asynchronously, through online modules and small coding projects. The instructor will be available for online troubleshooting sessions and for other support during the hours notionally set aside for classes in the weeks when modules and small coding projects are completed. Once the initial modules are completed, a synchronous discussion class will be held to explore ethical, professional, social and economic impacts, with some critical readings provided. The second half of the course will involve students working on a final project either individually or in groups (with the course instructor available for troubleshooting), presenting a draft of that project to colleagues for feedback, and finalizing the project.
Synchronous sessions will be delivered in a hybrid (hyflex) format, meaning that students can elect to attend any given synchronous session either in person or remotely via Zoom. Classes will be scheduled in 3-hour blocks.
Topics:
(1) Introduction to Coding & Access to Justice (Module 1: Automating the boring stuff)
(2) Data Gathering & Cleaning (Module 2: Finding legal datasets and creating new ones)
(3) Data Analysis (Module 3: I have some legal data, now what?)
(4) Artificial Intelligence (Module 4: Using generative AI to advance access to justice)
(5) Student Presentations of Draft Projects
Law & Social Change: The Law Commission of Ontario Workshop – Approaches to Law Reform
The Law Commission of Ontario Workshop – Approaches to Law Reform explores “law reform” as a distinct field of legal expertise, advocacy, and strategy. Each class is led by one or more expert practitioners experienced in developing and directing different approaches to law reform. Students will work with the practitioners and course instructors from the Law Commission of Ontario (LCO) to develop their own concrete, sophisticated, and actionable law reform proposal.
Students are free to develop their own law reform proposal. For example, a proposal may explore an issue like:
·Foreign election interference
·Politicization of Ontario’s process for appointing judges
·Youth safety online
·Workplace surveillance
·Expanded Gladue Reports and Impact of Race and Culture Assessments in criminal courts
·Rolling stops for cyclists
·Online content creator rights and protections
·Commercialization of space and lunar exploration
·Regulating “deep fake” images, audio and video used to harass, extort, defame, etc
·Regulating AI in civil and criminal courts, health care, policing, etc.
·Defining a set of AI prohibitions (such as mass real-time biometric surveillance).
Students who complete the course will gain a practical, hands-on understanding of how:
·“Law reform” engages a sophisticated mix of social, political, economic, and legal considerations, as well as community coalition building, media messaging, and others.
·Lobbyists and political staff participate in law reform and are regulated.
·Government ministries and the legislature develop laws, respond to test case litigation, and respond to court-ordered law reform.
·Cutting-edge law reform is happening in Indigenous law and in response to artificial intelligence.
·Think tanks, non-governmental organizations, single-issue proponents, and public interest advocates engage politicians with “early signals” and the need for law reform.
Copyright
Copyright claims are ubiquitous, covering everything from angst-filled teenage poetry to impersonal, algorithmic recreations of a Rembrandt masterpiece; from commercially lucrative musical compositions and digital code, to (potentially) priceless vampire fan fiction. This course is designed to introduce students to the universe of rules, theories, policies and controversies that characterize the Canadian copyright system which regulates monopoly interests in musical, literary, dramatic and artistic works. The course will examine questions such as: What is a copyright? When does it vest? How long does it persist? Who can be an author? And, what are the relevant rights and obligations? We will consider the relationship between the private expectation of owning one’s own work, and the public need for knowledge and information, and evaluate the legal and para-legal mechanisms through which this tension is controlled if not resolved in the context of technologies, old and new.
The majority of the course readings will be drawn from statutory code and judicial decisions. However, since copyright law plays a substantive role in our understanding of ownership, creativity, and cooperation in society, this course will pay substantial attention to the social, moral/political and economic theories that underpin the legal regime. While most cases and readings will be focused on the Canadian legal system, we will, as relevant, consider notable divergences in, and alternatives offered by, other legal systems, particularly the UK and the US.
Students will be expected to have read the prescribed materials listed on the syllabus before coming to class; in-class lectures will be modest and the discussions will place substantial emphasis on collected review and problem solving rather than the more-traditional one-way lecture. Specifically, the in-person classroom meetings, twice a week, will be divided into: (i) 1-hr lectures that are designed to review the rules and theories covered in the readings, and (ii) 1-hr application oriented, case-study discussions that are designed to rehearse applying the rules and theories on hypothetical fact situations).