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Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Benjamin L. Berger is Professor and York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Professor Berger served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018. He holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence. He has published broadly in these fields and his work has appeared in leading legal and interdisciplinary journals and edited collections.
Jared Will & Associates
Joshua Blum practices refugee, immigration and national security law in Toronto. He represents refugees in deportation and detention proceedings before the Immigration and Refugee Board and the Federal Court. He has also appeared before the Ontario Superior Court, the Federal Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada. Joshua devotes a significant portion of his practice to test case litigation, and has been part of counsel teams challenging limits on access to habeas corpus for immigration detainees; inadmissibility laws targeting refugees who support national liberation movements; and in the constitutional challenge to the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement.
Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability, University of Ottawa
Nathalie Chalifour is a Full Professor with the Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability at the University of Ottawa. Nathalie’s research is focused on the rapidly evolving legal framework for climate change. She has written extensively about the division of powers over greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing and climate litigation under the Charter. Nathalie has made written and oral submissions on behalf of interveners before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Saskatchewan and Ontario Courts of Appeal, and the Supreme Court of Canada. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars and was awarded the Faculty’s Excellence in Research Award as well as the Public Engagement Award for Media Relations in 2021. Professor Chalifour obtained her PhD in Law at Stanford University, and has a Masters in Law obtained as a Stanford Fellow and Fulbright Scholar.
Stockwoods LLP
Gerald is a partner at Stockwoods LLP where he practices criminal, constitutional, administrative, and select civil litigation. He has been counsel in over 20 appeals in the Supreme Court of Canada, including for the Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights in R v McGregor. He is an advocacy advisor with the Supreme Court Advocacy Institute and a member of the Pro Bono Inmate Appeal Program at the Court of Appeal for Ontario.
Gerald is an author/editor of various legal texts. He teaches on the faculty of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s National Criminal Law Program and the adjunct faculty of the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law.
Gerald is an elected Bencher of the Law Society of Ontario (LSO). He is Co-Chair of the LSO Equity and Indigenous Affairs Committee, a Trustee of the Law Foundation of Ontario, and an adjudicator on the Law Society Tribunal.
Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University
Steve Coughlan (LLB, PhD) is a professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, where he has taught since 1991. He is the recipient of many teaching awards at the faculty, university, and regional level, including the Association of Atlantic Universities’ Distinguished Teacher Award, and is also a frequent participant in judicial education programs. He is an editor of the Criminal Reports, an author of the National Judicial Institute Criminal Law e-Letter, and the author or co-author of more than thirty-five books. These include Criminal Procedure (currently in its fourth edition), Learning Canadian Criminal Law (tenth through sixteenth editions), the Annual Review of Criminal Law (2004 to present) and Detention and Arrest (currently in its third edition). In 2019 Canadian Lawyer Magazine named him as one of the 25 Most Influential Lawyers in the Justice System and Legal Profession for his advocacy around reforming the Criminal Code.
Department of Politics, Acadia University
Erin Crandall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and the Coordinator for the Law and Society Program at Acadia University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from McGill University. Her research sits primarily at the intersection of Canadian law and politics, including studies of judicial selection systems, public support for courts, constitutional amendment, and election law. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and Public Policy and Administration, among other publications. Along with Andrea Lawlor (McMaster University), she is currently undertaking a SSHRC-funded project on public support for the Supreme Court of Canada.
Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Deborah Curran is a Professor at the University of Victoria in the Faculty of Law and School of Environmental Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences), and the Executive Director of the Environmental Law Centre where she works with students on environmental law files for community and Indigenous organizations across British Columbia. Deborah’s work is in the areas of land and water law, with a particular focus on environmental protection and collaborative watershed governance, municipal sustainability, and how Indigenous law is shaping colonial law.
Ministry of Attorney General of British Columbia
School of Global & Public Law, University of New South Wales
Rosalind Dixon is a Scientia Professor of Law and Director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at UNSW Sydney. She is a graduate of UNSW and Harvard Law, and previously served as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, visiting professor at Harvard, Chicago, Columbia and NUS law schools, and co-president of the International Society of Public Law. Her work focuses on comparative constitutional design and construction, with a particular attention to issues of democracy, inequality and change.
Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Farrow is internationally recognized as a leading scholar on access to justice, legal process and the profession. He is regularly consulted and invited to participate at conferences, expert panels, policy initiatives and justice projects in Canada and around the world, including as a research expert on the OECD’s Advisory Justice Research Consortium. Professor Farrow has been awarded numerous Canadian and international grants to conduct innovative and ground-breaking research, including his $1 million SSHRC “Costs of Justice” grant, which was the first national study of its kind to look at financial and other costs associated with access to justice in Canada. Professor Farrow is consistently ranked in the top 10% of authors on SSRN by all-time and annual downloads and his research is widely cited and relied on by researchers, policy makers, governments, judges and the media in Canada and around the world.
Professor Farrow has held numerous administrative and leadership appointments at Osgoode Hall Law School, including Associate Dean, Associate Dean (Academic), Associate Dean (Research & Institutional Relations), and Faculty Council Chair. He is the Chair of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the founding Academic Director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution, and was the Director of the York Centre for Public Policy and Law. He also serves on numerous research and policy panels and committees, including Canada’s Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters (he was credited as “the holder of the pen” on the Action Committee’s ground-breaking and often nationally and internationally cited Roadmap for Change report). Professor Farrow was formerly a litigation lawyer at the Torys law firm in Toronto.
College of Law, University of Saskatchewan
Dr. Fehr has been appointed to a tenure-track position in the College of Law, commencing January 1, 2024. He was previously an Assistant Professor at both the Faculty of Law at Thompson Rivers University and the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. Before embarking on an academic career, Dr. Fehr worked as a law clerk at the Provincial Court of Saskatchewan and as a Crown prosecutor for Saskatchewan Justice. His teaching and research interests fall broadly into the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and constitutional law. Dr. Fehr is currently a research affiliate with the Centre for Constitutional Studies and has been an editor on several Canadian law journals. His scholarship has appeared in numerous academic journals and he is the author of two books: Constitutionalizing Criminal Law and Judging Sex Work: Bedford and the Attenuation of Rights.
Osgoode Hall Law School
Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Colin Grey joined the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University in 2019. Professor Grey teaches and writes about immigration law, refugee law, and administrative law. In the past he has taught courses in legal theory, international migration law, and an interdisciplinary methods course for doctoral students. At Queen’s he will be developing three online courses for the new Graduate Diploma in Immigration and Citizenship Law.
Professor Grey’s scholarship explores issues of public law theory in the domain of migration law and governance. His publications include Justice and Authority in Immigration Law (Hart Publishing, 2015), as well as articles in Philosophy & Social Criticism, the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, and Legal Theory. He is co-editor, with Professor Sharry Aiken, of the only casebook on Canadian immigration and refugee law, as well as co-author with Professor Aiken, Donald Galloway, and Audrey Macklin of Migration Law in Canada, 2d ed (Kluwer Law International, International Encyclopedia of Laws, 2015).
West Coast Environmental Law
Anna Johnston is a public interest environmental lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, where her work focuses on environmental impact assessment, cumulative effects, and constitutional, biodiversity and climate law. She is a member of the Minister’s Advisory Council on Impact Assessment, co-chairs the Environmental Planning and Assessment Caucus of the Canadian Environmental Network, and has authored numerous reports, papers and book chapters on impact assessment and the constitutional division of powers. She has appeared before superior and appellate courts in BC and Alberta, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada.
Peter A Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), University of Ottawa
Dr. Kyle Kirkup is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Common Law Section). He has written about topics including the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, the origins of gender identity and gender expression in human rights law, queer legal theory, and the legal regulation of sex work. After serving as a law clerk to the Honourable Madam Justice Louise Charron at the Supreme Court of Canada, Kyle completed graduate work at Yale Law School and the University of Toronto. His work has appeared in journals including the University of Toronto Law Journal, the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, and the Dalhousie Law Journal. He is currently working on a book length manuscript, under contract with UBC Press, titled Law and Order Queers: Respectability, Victimhood, and the Carceral State.
Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Kidd White began her association at Osgoode Hall Law School as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security. Prior to joining the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School, Professor Kidd White held a two-year research fellowship at the Jean Monnet Center for Regional and International Economic Law and Justice, and a teaching position with the Institute for International Law and Justice. Professor Kidd White is a faculty member of the Ontario Legal Philosophy Partnership. Her current research interests consider legal argumentation, and the public nature and promise of law. A particular focus is on the ways in which political communities interpret the legal values and principles embedded in legal texts and judgements, and the ways in which they draw upon local, regional, or international histories and experiences to provide these legal values and principles with shape and clarity.
Political Science, McMaster University
Andrea Lawlor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. She specializes in public policy, as well as administrative and election law. Her work also focuses on public opinion toward the Canadian judicial system. She holds a PhD from McGill University and a MSL from Western’s Faculty of Law.
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Sonia Lawrence joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2001. She graduated from the University of Toronto’s joint LLB/MSW program, went on to serve as law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada, and pursued graduate work at Yale Law School. Her work centers on the critical analysis of legal conception of equality. Over the course of her career she has held a number of service positions at Osgoode and York including Assistant Dean of First Year, Director of Osgoode’s Graduate Program, Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, and membership on York’s Senate Executive Committee. She currently serves on the Board of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. Professor Lawrence’s research interests include Public Law, Gender, Race, Critical Race Feminism, Feminism, Equality Law, Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
Vanessa MacDonnell is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section) and Co-Director of the uOttawa Public Law Centre. Her research examines the constitutional functions of the executive branch, inter-institutional relationships, unwritten constitutional norms and principles, and the relationship between Canada’s legal and political constitutions. She also writes about police powers and the jury. She is currently completing a SSHRC-funded research project on quasi-constitutional legislation. She is also the Canadian Principal Investigator on a $1.7 million interdisciplinary, international research project on unwritten constitutional norms and principles, funded in Round 7 of the Open Research Area Competition.
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Osgoode Hall Law School
Palma Paciocco is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. She holds an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, B.C.L. and LL.B. degrees from the McGill Faculty of Law, and a B.A. (Hons.) from the McGill Faculty of Arts. Professor Paciocco served as a law clerk to the Honourable Justice Louise Charron of the Supreme Court of Canada and is called to the Bars of Ontario and New York. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of evidence law, criminal law and theory, criminal procedure, sentencing, and professional ethics.
Ministry of the Attorney General
Faculty of Law, University of New Brunswick
Civil Law Division of the Ministry of the Attorney General – Constitutional Law Branch
Yashoda Ranganathan is Senior Counsel in the Constitutional Law Branch, Civil Law Division of the Ministry of the Attorney General. Prior to joining MAG, Yashoda was an Associate at Lenczner Slaght LLP.
Yashoda has argued cases in all levels of Court in Ontario, in the Alberta Court of Appeal and in the Supreme Court of Canada.
Yashoda has taught constitutional litigation at University of Windsor Faculty of Law, is a skills instructor for the Advocates’ Society and is frequently asked to speak on a variety of topics including constitutional and administrative law and practice, as well as diversity, inclusion and mentorship in the legal profession.
Prior to going to law school at Queen’s, Yashoda was a professional actor.
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Sean Rehaag is the Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies and the Director of the Refugee Law Laboratory. He specializes in immigration and refugee law, administrative law, legal process, access to justice, and new legal technologies. He frequently contributes to public debates about immigration and refugee law, and he engages in law reform efforts in these areas. He is also committed to exploring innovative teaching methodologies, with a particular interest in clinical and experiential education. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the Academic Director at Parkdale Community Legal Services.
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Ryder joined Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty in 1987. His research and publications focus on a range of contemporary constitutional issues, including those related to federalism, equality rights, freedom of expression, Aboriginal rights, and Quebec secession. He has also published articles that explore the historical evolution of constitutional principles and is currently researching the history of book censorship in Canada.
Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Dayna Nadine Scott was appointed as York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy in 2018. She is cross-appointed with York’s Faculty of Environmental Studies & Urban Change. Professor Scott is a Co-Director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic and a Co-Coordinator of the joint MES/JD program. Professor Scott joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2006 after completing a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at McGill’s Faculty of Law and a Hauser Global Research Fellowship at NYU. Professor Scott’s research interests focus on contestation over extraction; exercises of Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and resources; the distribution of pollution burdens affecting marginalized communities and vulnerable populations; gender and environmental health; and the justice dimensions of the transition to a greener economy.
Landings LLP
Jacqueline Swaisland is a partner at Landings LLP. She obtained her law degree at Queen’s Law School and obtained her LLM as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School. Jacqueline is a former member of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board and has been adjunct faculty at Osgoode Law School, the University of Ottawa, Toronto Metropolitan University, Queen’s University, and the University of Guelph. Jacqueline’s legal practice encompasses all areas of Canadian immigration and refugee law. She also acts for both individuals and organizations in cases involving the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. She is an experienced litigator, having regularly appeared before the Immigration and Refugee Board and all levels of court, including multiple times before the Supreme Court of Canada. She recently appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association in their intervention to the challenge of Canada’s Safe Third Country Agreement.
Political Science, McGill University
Dr. Debra Thompson is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship seek to analyze the complex historic and contemporary relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. Dr. Thompson’s multiple award-winning first book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border. The Long Road Home was one of Indigo’s top 100 books, CBC’s best non-fiction of 2022, the Hill Times top 100 books of 2022, the winner of the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize for the best book on Canadian politics and government and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dr. Thompson is a frequent commentator in print media, radio, podcasts, and television, appeared in the 2022 documentary Black Ice, and in collaboration with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, produces and hosts the In/Equality, a special series of the Policy Options podcast on the many facets of inequality in Canadian society. She is currently working on several projects that extract and examine the mechanics of systemic racism in Canada.