Expertise: Legal Pluralism

Berger, Benjamin L.

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. Prior to joining Osgoode, he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, and was cross-appointed in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Victoria, where he began teaching in 2004. He holds a JSD and LLM from Yale University, where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar and a SSHRC doctoral fellow. He earned his LLB and the Law Society Gold Medal from the University of Victoria, and was awarded the Gold Medal in Arts and the Governor General’s Academic Medal for his BA (Hons) studies at the University of Alberta. In 2002-2003, Professor Berger served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada.

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.  He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and served as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society from 2014-2018. He is also co-editor of multiple edited collections, including Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority (Hart, 2016) and The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). He has been a principal investigator or collaborator on multiple research grants and has received awards for his scholarly work, including the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination” and, in 2015, the CALT-ACPD Prize for Academic Excellence.

Professor Berger is active in judicial, professional, and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. While at UVic Law, Professor Berger twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award. He received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.

Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought and is the Academic Program Director of the Osgoode Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure.

Research Interests: Law and Religion; Criminal and Constitutional Law and Theory; the Law of Evidence; Legal History; Judgment and the Judiciary; Law and the Humanities.

Wai, Robert S.

Robert Wai has been a member of the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1998, where he researches and teaches in various areas of international economic law including International Trade Regulation and International Business Transactions. His teaching has also included Contracts, Ethical Lawyering in a Global Community, and Law and Economic Relations.  He has served in a number of governance roles including as Associate Dean, as a member of the Osgoode Hall Faculty Association executive and the Board of Trustees of the York University Pension Plan, and as chair of Faculty Council and a number of its standing committees.

Professor Wai has been a Jean Monnet Fellow and Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, and a visiting professor at other international institutions including the University of Hong Kong, Sciences Po Law School in Paris, and Brown University. Since 2010 Professor Wai has served on the Academic Council of the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) and as a regular core faculty at its workshops. Professor Wai graduated with a BCom in economics from McGill University (Beatty Gold Medalist), and an MPhil degree in international relations at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After completing an LLB from the University of British Columbia, he clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Gérard La Forest, and worked at law firms in Vancouver and New York.  He completed his doctorate at Harvard Law School, where his dissertation critically examined structures of policy argumentation in private international law.

Professor Wai’s research explores how the contemporary global economy is constituted and regulated by plural regimes of transnational law including public and private law, domestic and international law, substantive and procedural law, and state and non-state norms. In 2019, he was the Donald Mawhinney Lecturer in Professional Ethics at UBC, and in the summer of 2021 he will deliver a course on Liberalism and Private International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law.

Drummond, Susan G.

Professor Susan Drummond joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1999, and specializes in the areas of legal anthropology, comparative law, civil law, family law, and wills and estates. She was the first student in Canada to graduate with both a civil and common law degree as well as a Master’s in Social Work. She has a doctorate in law from McGill University. Her BA in philosophy and her postgraduate Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies from the Université d’Aix-Marseille, specializing in legal theory and legal anthropology, make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar. Beyond her publications in scholarly journals, she has published three books, Incorporating the Familiar: An Investigation into Legal Sensibilities in Nunavik, based on fieldwork on the interactions between state and non-state criminal law sensibilities in Inuit communities in northern Quebec; Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities, based on field work on non-state family law in Andalucia, which won the Canadian Law and Society Association/Association canadienne droit et société 2006 Book Prize; and Unthinkable Thoughts; Academic Freedom and the One State Model for Israel and Palestine, based on fieldwork on the intersections between politically controversial ideas and the Canadian academy, was published in November, 2013.

Professor Drummond is currently engaged in an extensive, fine-grained ethnographic study of elder law, elder financial abuse, and estates and trust law and litigation in Ontario, with a focus on legal practice, legal ethics, and legal professionalism in the associated bar.

Research Interests: Family Law, Estates and Trusts, Legal Theory, Comparative Law, Legal Anthropology

Buchanan, Ruth

Ruth Buchanan joined Osgoode Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty, Professor Buchanan taught at the law schools of the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. Professor Buchanan also holds an ongoing appointment as a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she teaches in the Melbourne Law Masters program.

Professor Buchanan holds an SJD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an LLB from the University of Victoria and an AB from Princeton University. In 2011, Professor Buchanan founded the Law.Arts.Culture Colloquium, to create a vibrant forum for the discussion of emerging interdisciplinary work on law and humanities. Since that time, Professor Buchanan, through LAC, has hosted more than two dozen speakers, events and installations. She is also a past Director of the Graduate Program (Research), and a past co-Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies.

An interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work spans critical legal theory, sociology of law and cultural legal studies, Dr. Buchanan’s scholarship has engaged with a range of topics including NAFTA and labour rights, the WTO and global constitutionalism, social movements and resistance to globalization, Indigenous law and legal pluralism, law and film. She has published widely and collaborates frequently with legal scholars in Canada and internationally. Professor Buchanan co-edited the collections Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014) with Peer Zumbansen and Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (2012) with Sundhya Pahuja and Stewart Motha. She has published widely, including in the Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities; Miami Law Review; Leiden Journal of International Law; Law,Text,Culture; Journal of Legal Education, Nordic Journal of International Law; Osgoode Hall Law Journal, and the Journal of Law and Society. She has been involved in the editorial boards or editorial advisory boards of the Canadian Journal of Women and Law, Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities, Transnational Legal Theory.

In 2015-16, Professor Buchanan was awarded an Osgoode Hall Research Fellowship for her ongoing project, “Visualizing Developments,” which considers the variety of visual mechanisms through which knowledge about development is produced and disseminated by international institutions. Professor Buchanan is also currently writing a book on International Development with Sundhya Pahuja and Luis Eslava as part of the Routledge-Cavendish Critical Approaches to Law series.

Professor Buchanan has taught courses in the areas of: Globalization and Law, Law and Social Change, Trade, Human Rights and Development, Law and Film. In the Osgoode Graduate Program, she has taught the Legal Research seminar and convened the Study Group on Law in a Global Context. Professor Buchanan has supervised many LLM and doctoral students in the areas of law and development, legal theory, legal sociology, or visual legal studies and law and film.

Research Interests: Law and Development, Legal Theory, Law and Film

Boisselle, Andrée

Andrée Boisselle’s research interests are in the areas of indigenous law, comparative and constitutional law, pluralism and postcolonial legal theory.  She is currently completing her doctorate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.  Her doctoral research on Stó:lõ constitutionalism and the Coast Salish legal tradition has been supported by scholarships from the Trudeau Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  Her master’s thesis critically examined the development of the duty to consult First Nations in Canadian law.  It received the Quebec Association of Law Professors Prize in 2008.  Before pursuing graduate studies, she practised litigation in Québec with McCarthy Tétrault LLP and did contractual work with the Supreme Court of Canada.

Bhabha, Faisal

Faisal Bhabha is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada. He also serves as the Faculty Director of the Canadian Common Law LLM degree program. He has researched and published in the areas of constitutional law, multiculturalism, law and religion, disability rights, national security and access to justice. He teaches constitutional law, human rights, legal ethics, and appellate advocacy. Previously, he sat as Vice-chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (2008-2011). He maintains a varied public and private law practice, appearing before administrative boards and tribunals and at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He advises and represents a variety of individuals and public interest organizations in matters pertaining to constitutional law and human rights. He has appeared as an expert witness before Canadian parliamentary committees and served as a member of the Equity Advisory Group of the Law Society of Ontario. He has lived and worked in the Middle East and South Africa, and has lectured and taught in many countries. He is currently a senior editor with the International Review of Human Rights Law.

Research Interests: constitutional law; equality and anti-discrimination; administrative law; legal ethics and professionalism; legal process; dispute resolution; legal education