New Faces: Osgoode welcomes eight faculty members and new appointments this fall

Seven faculty members and one Catalyst Fellow will join York University this fall at Osgoode Hall Law School as new professors or new appointments. They bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the law school.

Joining Osgoode are Professors Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, Karen Drake, Paul Maharg, Heidi Matthews, Jennifer Nadler, Martha Simmons and Estair Van Wagner; and Catalyst Fellow Jamil Ammar.

“We are delighted to welcome these new faculty members to the Osgoode community," said Osgoode Dean Lorne Sossin.  "We know that they will enrich the quality of teaching and scholarship in our academic programs and that our students will benefit tremendously from their intelligence, knowledge and thought leadership."

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay
Assistant Professor Saptarishi Bandopadhyay’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of intellectual property (particularly copyright), disaster management, environmental law and politics, as well as issues related to risk, technology and society.

He is currently at work on two projects: the first studies the status of photography in copyright law, while the second attempts to retell the history of international refugee protection through the lens of environmental history and science and technology studies.

Prior to joining the full-time Osgoode faculty, during the 2016-17 academic year Bandopadhyay served as a visiting professor and the Catalyst Fellow at Osgoode, and an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern University School of Law. He holds an SJD from Harvard Law School, masters degrees from Harvard and American University’s Washington College of Law, and a BA LLB from the National University of Juridical Sciences in India.

Karen Drake
Associate Professor Karen Drake joined Osgoode from the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, where she had been a faculty member since July 2013. A citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, she has a BA (Honours) in philosophy from Lakehead, an MA in philosophy from Queen’s University, as well as JD and LLM degrees from the University of Toronto.

Her research interests include the intersection between liberalism and Aboriginal rights, the duty to consult and accommodate Aboriginal peoples in the context of resource extraction, Métis legal issues, and the role of legal processes and legal education in promoting reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

She serves as a commissioner with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a commissioner with the Commission on Métis Rights and Self-Government, a member of the Board of Directors of the Indigenous Bar Association, and a member of the Thunder Bay Métis Council.

Paul Maharg
Professor Paul Maharg is a leading scholar in legal education whose work is focused on interdisciplinary educational innovation, the design of regulation in legal education, and the use of technology-enhanced learning. He joined Osgoode as Distinguished Professor of Practice in May 2017. The Professor of Practice program is hosted by Osgoode Professional Development (OsgoodePD).

He previously served as professor of law and director of the Centre for Profession, Education and Regulation in Law (PEARL) at Australian National University College of Law, as well as professor of Law (part-time) at Nottingham Law School. He also currently holds visiting professorships at Hong Kong University Faculty of Law and Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law.

He has produced four books and two book series on legal education, and digital games and learning, as well as influential reports into the regulation of legal services education in England and Wales and other jurisdictions.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) National Teaching Fellow and a Principal Fellow of the HEA, he has a PhD in literature, aesthetics and philosophy (Edinburgh University); an LLB, Dip Ed and MA in English literature and language (Glasgow University); and a PGCE (Jordanhill College of Education).

Heidi Matthews
Assistant Professor Heidi Matthews researches and teaches in the areas of international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory. Her work theorizes contemporary shifts in the practice and discourse of the global legal regulation of political violence, with particular attention to history and gender, as well as political, critical and aesthetic theory.

Prior to joining Osgoode, Matthews held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the SOAS School of Law, University of London. She served as a law clerk to the judges of the Appeals Chamber at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and as an intern at the Immediate Office of the Prosecutor at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Matthews’ current projects include a critical legal evaluation of American, Canadian and British counterinsurgency policy and practice, a re-evaluation of the role of international criminal law during the Cold War, and an intellectual and political history of the concept of military necessity in international law. She is also working on a research and documentary film project that examines narratives of allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women at the end of the Second World War.

She has a BA from Mount Allison, BCL/LLB from McGill, and an SJD from Harvard.

Jennifer Nadler
Assistant Professor Jennifer Nadler has been a visiting scholar at Osgoode and an instructor of contract law and property law in Osgoode Professional Development’s Common Law LLM Program since 2013. The recipient of numerous academic honours over the past several years, she received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2014.

She has BA, JD and SJD degrees from the University of Toronto as well as an LLM from New York University. Her doctoral dissertation was a study of the private law implications of the conceptions of freedom portrayed in the novels of Henry James. She publishes in the areas of private law, theoretical jurisprudence, and law and literature.

Martha Simmons
Martha Simmons is the Winkler Professor in Dispute Resolution and also serves as the academic co-director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution at York University/Osgoode Hall Law School. She has been the director of Osgoode’s Mediation Intensive Program and Mediation Clinic since 2012.

Simmons, who has JD, LLM and PhD degrees from Osgoode, was the recipient of an Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013 for her work in both the JD and graduate programs. Her primary areas of research and teaching are dispute resolution, legal education, innovation and access to justice.

She is active in the community and currently serves as Academic and Policy Committee co-chair of the Family Dispute Resolution Institute of Ontario and as a vice-president of the Association of Canadian Clinical Legal Education (ACCLE).

Estair Van Wagner
Assistant Professor Estair Van Wagner researches and teaches in the areas of land use planning, natural resource and property law and is do-director of Osgoode’s Environmental Justice and Sustainability Clinic.

Van Wagner joined Osgoode from the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law where she taught property, natural resource, and resource management law. She completed her doctoral work, a qualitative empirical study on property and land use law in Ontario, at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2017. Her doctoral studies were supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Graduate Scholarship and the Mary Jane Mossman Feminist Legal Studies Scholarship.

Van Wagner – who holds a BA (University of Victoria), MES/JD (York/Osgoode) and PhD (Osgoode, October 8, 2017) – is currently involved in a project examining government consultation with Maori under New Zealand mining law. She is also a collaborator on a SSHRC insight grant “Consent & Contract: Authorizing Extraction in Ontario’s Ring of Fire” with Osgoode Professors Dayna N. Scott (primary investigator), Andrée Boisselle and Deborah McGregor.  She recently participated as a judgment writer in the Feminist Judgments Project Aotearoa, forthcoming in late-2017.

Jamil Ammar (Catalyst Fellow 2017-18)
Professor Jamil Ammar is the Osgoode Catalyst Fellow for the 2017-18 academic year.

Syrian-born Ammar joins Osgoode from Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey where he had been a visiting scholar since the fall of 2015. He was at Rutgers as part of the Scholars at Risk Program, which helps academics to escape dangerous conditions and continue their important work.

The author of two books as well as numerous articles, reports and reviews, he has a PhD in law (Edinburgh University), a master’s in international commercial law (University of Wales Swansea), a master’s in commercial law (Damascus University), and an LLB (Damascus University).

His research and teaching focus on the interaction between the law and emerging technologies. He is currently engaged in two research projects: one examines the impact of 3-D printing technologies on intellectual property law; the other assesses the viability of software technology in curbing extreme speech on social media platforms.