York Osgoode Hall Law School Professors Giuseppina D’Agostino and Poonam Puri will serve as scholars-in-residence with the Law Commission of Ontario (LCO) from July to December 2009.
The Osgoode Hall Law School LCO Scholar-in-Residence Program provides Osgoode scholars with an opportunity to pursue research in collaboration with an institution that is committed to adding to knowledge and using it in the development of pragmatic recommendations for law reform.
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Left: Poonam Puri
Puri, a co-director of the Jay & Barbara Hennick Centre for Business & Law at Osgoode and the Schulich School of Business, will be responsible for carrying out the LCO’s joint and several liability project. The purpose of the project is to consider whether the Ontario Business Corporations Act, which provides for joint and several liability, should be amended to bring it in greater alignment with the Ontario Securities Act, federal legislation and trends in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
D’Agostino, director of the IP Osgoode Intellectual Property Law & Technology Program, will address the intersection of intellectual property, privacy and ethics issues around electronic health records. She will focus on the Motherisk Program, based at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, which is moving from paper to electronic records. This project will build on work she has done on intellectual property and privacy issues around e-records in the UK. Although this is not an LCO project, it will be completed in association with the LCO.
Right: Giuseppina D’Agostino
"The collaboration between Osgoode and the LCO provides an excellent opportunity to highlight to the public the ways in which both institutions contribute to the development of policy and knowledge mobilization," said Osgoode Interim Dean Jinyan Li and LCO Executive Director Patricia Hughes in a joint announcement about the appointments of D’Agostino and Puri. Both professors will be released from their teaching responsibilities for the fall term.
The LCO will also collaborate with Osgoode and IP Osgoode in holding a symposium on Jan. 29, 2010, that will focus on D’Agostino’s research into the sometimes conflicting claims around medical e-records. It is also anticipated that Osgoode, the Hennick Centre for Business & Law and the LCO will organize a round table to bring together those concerned with joint and several liability to help develop appropriate recommendations as part of the LCO’s usual consultation processes.
Launched in September 2007 and housed at York, the LCO operates independently of government to recommend law reforms to increase access to justice.