This story is published in YFile’s New Faces Feature Issue 2022. Every September, YFile introduces and welcomes those joining the York University community, and those with new appointments.
Osgoode Hall Law School welcomes two new faculty members this fall: Suzanne Chiodo and Patricia (Trish) McMahon.
“We’re proud that we’ve attracted some of the world’s most accomplished legal thinkers and teachers to Osgoode,” said Dean Mary Condon. “Professor Chiodo and Professor McMahon both come to us with exceptional track records and we’re excited to welcome them aboard.”
Suzanne Chiodo
Assistant Professor Suzanne Chiodo comes to Osgoode Hall Law School from the Faculty of Law at Western University. Before joining Western Law in 2020, she was a stipendiary lecturer in Law at the University of Oxford, U.K., and an adjunct faculty member at Osgoode. Prior to her academic career, she practiced as a class actions lawyer and insurance defence lawyer. She also served as a judicial clerk to Justice James O’Reilly with the Federal Court of Canada. She holds a BA Hons. and MA in modern history from the University of Oxford (2000) and a JD with Distinction from Western Law (2011). In addition, she completed a master of laws at Osgoode (2017) and recently successfully defended her DPhil degree from the University of Oxford (2021).
Chiodo’s research interests are interdisciplinary and engage civil procedure, access to justice and class actions in both the domestic and international contexts. She will teach several courses across the JD curriculum, specifically in the areas of civil procedure, litigation, legal process and tort law.
Patricia (Trish) McMahon
Assistant Professor Patricia (Trish) McMahon joins Osgoode from the law firm Torys LLP, where she was as a senior associate in the litigation department starting in 2016. She has also served since 2015 as the coordinator and lead interviewer in the oral history program with the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. Prior to these roles, she was an associate in the litigation department for the Toronto-based law firm Osler and served as a law clerk to Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada. McMahon has a BA in modern history from Western University (1994) and an MA in Canadian history from the University of Toronto. In 1999, she completed a PhD in Canadian history from the University of Toronto, followed by an LLB (2002). She completed an LLM at Yale Law School and a JSD in 2015. Her primary research interests relate to civil procedure, equity and legal history broadly defined.
She has extensive and varied research experience in civil procedure, constitutional history, legal biography and Canadian political history and foreign relations. She will teach several different courses in Osgoode’s JD program, particularly in the areas of civil procedure, contract law, legal process and legal history.