Type: Faculty

Hay, Douglas C.

Professor Emeritus Douglas Hay was cross-appointed to Osgoode Hall Law School and York’s Department of History in 1981, teaching the comparative history of criminal procedure, punishment, and crime, and the history of private law in the common law world. He was co- director of an international project on the evolution of the contract of employment: Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (2004) and other titles, most recently ‘Working Time, Dinner Time, Serving Time: Labour and Law in Industrialization’ in Law With Class: Essays Inspired by the Work of Harry Glasbeek (2019) and ‘The Master and Servant Statute of 1823: Enlarging the Powers of Justices Act’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 43 (2022), 3-23.

Other work includes the English high court’s criminal jurisdiction (Criminal Cases on the Crown Side of King’s Bench 1740-1800 (2010); ‘Hanging and the English Judges: The Judicial Politics of Retention and Abolition,’ in America’s Death Penalty: Between Past and Present (2010); D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, E.P. Thompson (eds.), Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (2nd edition, with new introductions, 2011); ‘E.P. Thompson and the Rule of Law: Qualifying the Unqualified Good’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (2021), 202-220; and the ‘Preface’ to the concluding volume of Canadian State Trials, vol.5 (2022).
Professor Hay is presently writing about the administration of the criminal law in Georgian England, the role of the judiciary in King’s Bench, and the comparative history of criminal procedure in the British Empire. He has published books and articles on the history of English and Quebec criminal law; history of criminal procedure; social history of crime; judicial biography; courts and their political significance; and the history of employment law. He has been a visitor at Yale, Warwick, and Columbia law schools, and has been on the boards of the Canadian Historical Review, Law and History Review, the Law and Society Association, and the American Society for Legal History. He has given the Chorley Lecture (London School of Economics), the Iredell Lecture in Legal History (University of Lancaster), The Hugh Alan Maclean Lecture (University of Victoria Faculty of Law), the Weir Memorial Lecture (University of Alberta School of Law), the Annual Lecture for the American Society of Legal History, the Hugh Fitzpatrick Lecture in Legal Bibliography (Dublin), and the Richard Youard Lecture in Legal History (Oxford University). He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History in 2013, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Social Sciences) in 2016.

Haigh, Richard

Richard A. Haigh is an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and Director of York’s Centre for Public Policy and Law and Co-Director of the Part-Time LLM program in Constitutional Law at Osgoode Professional Development. He was, until December 2007, the Associate Director, Graduate Program at Osgoode Professional Development.

He has been a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, a Senior Advisor at the National Judicial Institute in Ottawa, and a Legal Research and Writing Lecturer at Osgoode. His research and teaching interests include Constitutional Law, Public Law, and Equity and Trusts, particularly the areas of freedom of conscience and religion.

His recent works include papers on the use of conscience and religion in legislative policies, whistleblowing, dialogue theory and freedom of expression’s relation to noise by-laws; he has also contributed a chapter to a book on legislating statutory interpretation, and a chapter to the casebook on public law (Emond, 3rd ed., 2015).

Girard, Philip

Philip Girard joined the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School on July 1, 2013. He had previously visited Osgoode as the James Lewtas Visiting Professor in 1993-94 and 2011-12. Professor Girard is one of Canada’s most distinguished legal academics and legal historians. In 2011, he was made an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the first Canadian to be so recognized, and in 2021 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Prior to joining Osgoode, he was University Research Professor, and Professor of Law, History & Canadian Studies at Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University.  At Dalhousie, he served as the Law School’s Acting Dean, 1991-93, and Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Research), 2002-06. In 2010-11 and 2017-18, he was Visiting Scholar, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto. He enjoys a richly deserved reputation for collegial and professional service including service as Chair, Law, Criminology & Socio-legal Studies Adjudication Committee, Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2008-11, and President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers, 2003-04.

His current work is a co-authored (with Jim Phillips and Blake Brown) three-volume History of Law in Canada. This is the first synoptic overview of the history of law in Canada, one that includes Indigenous law, civil law, and common law. Vol. I, beginnings to 1866 (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2018) received a Walter Owen Prize from the Foundation for Legal Research and honourable mention for the Wesley Pue Canadian Law and Society Association Prize. Vol. II, Law for the New Dominion (1867-1914) appeared in 2022 and won the Wesley Pue Canadian Law and Society Association Prize, while vol. III (1914-2000) is expected to appear in 2026. Other publications include Lawyers and Legal Culture in British North America: Beamish Murdoch of Halifax (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society,  2011), winner of the Clio-Atlantic Prize awarded by the Canadian Historical Association; and Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2005), for which Prof. Girard was awarded the  Champlain Society’s Floyd S. Chalmers Award 2006, for best book published on Ontario history in previous year, and shortlisted for the John A. Macdonald Prize 2006, for best book published on Canadian history in 2005.

He is also editor (with Jim Phillips) of two collections on Nova Scotia legal history: The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, 1754-2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle  (2004), and Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume III, Nova Scotia (1990), both published by the University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society. Professor Girard is the author of numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters, and is Associate Editor of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

Gilmour, Joan M.

Professor Gilmour joined Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty in 1990, after practising civil litigation and administrative law.  She teaches Health Law, Legal Governance of Health Care, Torts, and Disability and the Law in the JD program. She developed and is the founding Director of Osgoode’s part-time LLM program specializing in Health Law, and teaches graduate courses on Professional Governance, and Legal Frameworks of the Canadian Healthcare System.  She is past Director of Osgoode’s Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, and past Acting and Associate Director of York University’s Centre for Health Studies. Professor Gilmour’s research and publications in health law span some of the most debated issues in contemporary society.  She completed a major study on the effects of tort law (negligence) on efforts to improve patient safety and reduce medical error.  Other research projects include an examination of the legal and ethical issues in decision-making about health care for children, and a study of the interrelationship of disability, gender, law and inequality.  She served as a member of the Expert Panel convened by the Council of Canadian Academies on medical assistance in dying, has acted as a consultant to Health Canada, and completed a study for the Ontario Law Reform Commission on assisted suicide, euthanasia, and foregoing life-sustaining treatment.  She has also completed studies on health care restructuring and privatization, professional regulation of complementary and alternative medicine, and the interrelation of poverty, health and access to justice.

Geva, Benjamin

Dr. Benjamin Geva is a Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He specializes in (domestic, comparative and international) commercial, financial and banking law, particularly in payment and credit instruments, fund transfers, electronic transferable transport documents, letters of credit, electronic banking, central banking, money & currency, digital currencies, and assets, and the regulation of the payment system. He obtained his LLB (cum laude) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1970) and his LLM and SJD at Harvard, and was admitted to the Ontario Bar in 1982. He has been on the Osgoode faculty since 1977. He practised with Blake, Cassels and Graydon in Toronto and is now (part-time) counsel with Torys where he is a member of the Payments and Cards Practice Group.

He was awarded prestigious competitive grants among others by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Foundation of Legal Research of the Canadian Bar Association and has written extensively in his areas of expertise, including a monograph on Financing Consumer Sales and Product Defences in Canada and the US (Toronto: Carswell, 1984), a treatise on the Law of Electronic Funds Transfer (New York: Matthew Bender, 1992, kept current with annual updates (since 1997 with contributors) until 2020, a comparative law text on Bank Collections and Payment Transactions (Oxford: OUP, 2001), a monograph on The Payment Order of Antiquity and the Middle Ages – A Legal History (Oxford and Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2011), and a text co-written with Dr. Sagi Peari on International Negotiable Instruments (Oxford: OUP, 2020).  As well, he is the founding editor in chief of the Banking and Finance Law Review (BFLR) (1986- 2018) and is now Chair of its Advisory Board.

He held visiting positions, in the United States at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Utah and Northwestern University as well as in the summer program of Duke University in Hong Kong; in Israel at Tel Aviv University; in Australia in Monash, Deakin, Melbourne and Sydney Universities; in Singapore at the National University of Singapore, in Germany in the University of Hamburg, and in France at the faculté de droit et de science politique d’Aix-Marseille. He has been a Visitor at the law faculties of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England and at Max-Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law in Hamburg (Germany), as well as a Senior Global Research Fellow at the Hauser Global Visitors Program at New York University School of Law, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna (Austria), and Visiting Scholar at the International Trade Law Division of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, (the substantive secretariat of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) in Vienna).

Under the IMF technical assistance program he has advised and drafted key financial sector and payment systems legislation for the authorities of several countries, particularly, on missions for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Haiti, Serbia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and Sri Lanka. For UNCITRAL he has been working on electronic transferable transport documents.  Both  in Canada and  the United States and  also in the international arena he has been either a member or an observer in legislative committees and drafting working or study groups in the areas of personal property security, securities transfers, letters of credits & independent guarantees, and payment laws.

His current research is on digital currencies and assets, payment and settlement laws and systems,  electronic transferable transport documents, and a text on General Principles of Canadian Law on Negotiable Instruments and Payment Transactions (to be published by Irwin Law)

Gavigan, Shelley A. M.

Shelley Gavigan is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, having retired as Professor of Law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in January 2017. She is a retired member of the Law Society of Ontario and the Law Society of Saskatchewan. She was a member of the Osgoode faculty for 31 years and taught courses in criminal law, family law, poverty law and children and the law. She was appointed Osgoode’s Associate Dean twice and served four terms as Academic Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services. She began her legal career as a lawyer in community legal clinics in Saskatchewan and was the first Director of Complaints/ Compliance with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission.

Her research and scholarship are significantly interdisciplinary, located primarily in legal history, socio-legal studies, feminist legal studies, clinical legal education, and social justice.  She is the author of  Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Osgoode Society with UBC, Press, 2012), which won the Canadian History Association’s 2013 CLIO Prize – The Prairies (awarded for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions to regional history) and was short-listed and received Honourable Mention for both the CHA’s 2013 prize awarded annually to the best scholarly book in Canadian history and the 2012 Canadian Law & Society Association’s Annual Book Prize for “an outstanding contribution to the study of law and society.”

Professor Gavigan’s research into the criminal and civil court records of nineteenth century North West Territories continues, as does her work focussed on ‘historicizing criminalization’ of Canada’s indigenous peoples.  Her recent scholarship includes, “Getting Their Man: The NWMP as Accused in the Territorial Criminal Court in the Canadian North-West, 1876-1903” in Lyndsay Campbell, Ted McCoy & Melanie Méthot, eds., Canada’s Legal Pasts:  Looking Forward, Looking Back (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2020) 179.

Research Interests: Socio-Legal Studies, Legal History, Criminal Law, Feminist Legal Studies, Family Law, Clinical Education

Farrow, Trevor C. W.

Trevor Farrow is Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School.

Research. 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.

Teaching. Professor Farrow’s undergraduate, graduate and professional teaching focuses on the administration of civil justice, including access to justice, legal process, legal and judicial ethics, advocacy and globalization. He has taught and lectured at universities across Canada and around the world. Professor Farrow has received teaching awards from Harvard University and Osgoode Hall Law School.

Administration. 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.

Research Interests. Access to justice; legal process and dispute resolution; professional and judicial ethics; advocacy; legal education; political theory and globalization.

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

D’Agostino, Giuseppina

Professor Giuseppina (Pina) D’Agostino is a law professor, lawyer, public speaker, board director and recognized international scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University specializing in intellectual property (IP), technology and innovation law and policy. She joined Osgoode in 2006 and is regularly called by Canadian and foreign governments for advice, has testified before Parliament and is a widely published author, regularly serves as a consultant and is a cited authority at the Supreme Court of Canada and in various media. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Intellectual Property Journal.

Professor D’Agostino brings her creativity and passion to trailblaze new initiatives and to serve in new roles as Founder and Director of the globally-recognized IP Osgoode, the award-winning, IPilogue, the IP Intensive, the IP Innovation Clinic, the first legal clinic of its kind helping inventors and start-ups across Canada and, more recently, founded the AI-powered IP Innovation ChatBot allowing underrepresented groups and the general public greater access to IP information.

She began her legal career as an Associate in a large Toronto law firm and was later recruited into the Canadian Government by the Recruitment of Policy Leaders (RPL) as a Senior Policy Analyst working on copyright policy. She serves on the Board of Directors of Alectra Inc. and Chairs its GRE&T Centre Advisory Committee advancing innovation and sustainable energy solutions. She held an Order in Council Appointment at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection where she served as Trustee, and currently sits on its Art Advisory Committee.

Professor D’Agostino is Co-Chair of the York University AI & Society Task Force, is appointed to the City of Vaughan Smart City Task Force and is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). She spent her last sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Prof D’Agostino is the recipient of various tri-council grants, honours and awards and is currently working on the second edition of Copyright Law (with Prof David Vaver, Irwin Law). Her peer-reviewed articles and her three books Copyright, Contract, Creators: New Media, New Rules, The Common Law of Intellectual Property: Essays in Honour of Professor David Vaver and Leading Legal Disruption: Artificial Intelligence and a Toolkit for Lawyers and the Law (with A Gaon and C Piovesan) are widely available.

She holds a Masters and Doctorate in Law (University of Oxford) with distinction, an LLB (Osgoode Hall Law School), an HonBA, summa cum laude, in English and Political Science and a specialization in French (York University), is an ICD.D from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and is a member of the Law Society of Ontario (2001 call).

Should you be interested in working with Prof D’Agostino on any of her research projects, please feel free to get in touch with her directly at gdagostino@osgoode.yorku.ca

Research Interests: Intellectual Property, data governance & ownership, Innovation law & policy,  emerging technologies (ie Artificial Intelligence, IoT, robotics, 3D printing, Blockchain etc)

Craig, Carys J.

Dr. Carys Craig joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2002. She is the Academic Director of the Osgoode Professional Development LLM Program in Intellectual Property Law, a founding member of IP Osgoode (Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law & Technology Program), and recently served as Osgoode’s Associate Dean (Research & Institutional Relations). In 2018, she held a MacCormick Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

A recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the 2015 President’s University-Wide Teaching Award, Dr. Craig teaches JD, graduate and professional courses in the areas of intellectual property, copyright and trademark law, and legal theory. She researches and publishes widely on intellectual property law and policy, with an emphasis on authorship (drawing on critical and feminist theory), users’ rights and the public domain. She is the author of Copyright, Communication & Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law (2011), and the co-editor of Trade-marks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 2014) and Copyright: Cases and Commentary on the Canadian and International Law, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 2013). Her award-winning work has been cited with approval by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Dr. Craig holds a First Class Honours Bachelor of Laws (LLB Hons) from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a Master of Laws (LLM) from Queen’s University in Kingston, and a Doctorate in Law (SJD) from the University of Toronto, where she was a graduate fellow of Ontario’s Centre for Innovation Law and Policy.