It’s a clothing conundrum: In competitive careers like law, first impressions can be last impressions if prospects don’t present a professional image.

But for some law students, having the appropriate clothing for on-campus interviews or other formal occasions is not always a luxury they can afford.

That’s why the Osgoode Venture Capital Law Society (OVCLS) is holding its first-ever clothing drive in the Goodmans LLP Junior Common Room (JCR) on the first floor of the Ignat Kaneff Building on Jan. 17 from noon to 2 p.m.

“Outside of the financial burden associated with attending law school, interviewing and recruitment periods also bear less obvious but equally burdensome costs associated with the process,” said 2L student Emma Kirwin, director of communications for the OVCLS.

“The cost of formal business attire can create an additional financial barrier that often goes unacknowledged,” she added. “Alleviating this burden can help students feel more confident, prepared and less stressed during an already stressful and arduous period.”

Yianni Patiniotis, a second-year student in the JD-MBA program and the co-director of external relations for OVCLS, said the organization hopes the inaugural clothing drive will become an annual event that involves other Osgoode student clubs.

“During the recruit and at other times when we’ve been in corporate business settings, we’ve realized how fortunate we were to not have to stress too much about the business attire that we were required to wear,” said Patiniotis.

“If anything,” he added, “we had options to choose from. But we recognized that not all our peers and colleagues have that luxury.”

OVCLS is seeking donations of lightly used suit jackets, dress pants, dress shirts, belts, ties, dress socks and shoes, including heels or flats for women.

The organizers plan to donate the clothing collected to Dress for Success Toronto and Suits Me Fine at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Osgoode students who need business attire will need to access it through those charities.

He changed laws, he changed lives and, at times, he helped change the course of Canadian history.

The brilliant and multi-dimensional legacy of former Osgoode dean and professor Peter W. Hogg was celebrated Jan. 10 during a day-long conference that brought together some of Canada’s brightest legal luminaries, including three sitting Supreme Court of Canada justices, three current judges of the Ontario  Court of Appeal, six former Osgoode deans and other leading legal thinkers from Canada and abroad. The event took place online and in-person at Osgoode’s downtown campus.

In sometimes touching personal reflections, speaker after speaker shared stories of Hogg’s fundamental influence on their careers, the impact of his legendary textbooks, his masterful teaching and prodigious courtroom achievements, and his essential kindness as a person and proud family man. In perhaps his most important roles, he was husband to Fran and father to Anne and David.

Hogg, who joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1970 and served as dean of the law school from 1998 to 2003, died at the age of 80 in February 2020. Fran died two weeks later. After leaving Osgoode in 2003, he served as scholar in residence in the Toronto office of law firm Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.

In opening remarks, Dean Trevor Farrow marvelled at how Hogg, a native New Zealander, became his adopted country’s leading authority on Canadian constitutional law. On his arrival at Osgoode in 1970, he said, then-dean Gerald Le Dain thrust two of the most unpopular courses on the neophyte faculty member: constitutional law and tax law. Using his classroom notes, Hogg later wrote his authoritative textbook, Constitutional Law of Canada (Thomson Carswell, 2007), which was first published in 1977. Now in its fifth edition, the book has been cited well over 200 times in Supreme Court of Canada decisions – more than any other source. His other texts, Liability of the Crown (Carswell, 2011), based on his PhD thesis, and Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law (Carswell, 2022), are equally respected.

Hogg also provided invaluable counsel to clients on countless legal questions and cases – some of them of historical importance. In the 1990s, he advised Yukon First Nations in self-government negotiations with the federal and Yukon governments, helping them to win unprecedented sovereignty over their traditional territory. In 2004, in what he looked back on as one of his proudest achievements, he was lead counsel for the Canadian government in the Supreme Court of Canada’s same-sex marriage reference. And in 2008, he advised Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean during the prorogation crisis involving the Conservative government of then prime minister Stephen Harper.

In his Supreme Court appearances, Hogg was like a chess master, eagerly facing down nine opponents and defeating them all, said former Osgoode dean and Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Patrick Monahan, borrowing from an observation by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Ian Binnie. Justice Monahan described him as the most influential Canadian lawyer of the past half-century.

But Hogg was first and foremost a consummate teacher who was lauded and loved for his clarity and kindness. His student reviews in course evaluations were consistently “astonishing,” said former dean and Ontario Court of Appeal Justice James MacPherson.

In the classroom, said Osgoode alumnus and Chief Justice of Ontario Michael Tulloch, “It was impossible not to be transfixed by his brilliance, his humility and his ability to simplify complex areas of the law.

“He answered every question carefully and reflectively,” added Justice Tulloch. “Everyone was made to feel important. All the while, he did it with a dry wit and the embodiment of decency.”

Like most students, Osgoode alumna and Supreme Court of Canada Justice Andromache Karakatsanis said she became a diehard fan of Hogg’s after taking his first-year constitutional law course. After that, she signed up for every course he taught.

“Everything he started to teach, I took, and I learned that every area of the law can be fascinating,” she said during the panel session featuring Justice Karakatsanis and her Supreme Court of Canada colleagues Justice Sheilah Martin and Justice Mahmud Jamal.

“He really modelled intellectual curiosity,” she added. “That’s what makes the law to this day so deeply and enduringly important and interesting.”

In a lighter moment, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour remembered being intimidated by Hogg’s reputation when she joined Osgoode’s faculty in 1974 and noticing his New Zealand accent.

“I can remember our first conversation and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to make it,’” she recalled. “But then I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’s not going to make it either.’”

In the end, however, Hogg’s influence helped inspire the future course of her career, she said. “I’m absolutely convinced that he was the original cause of the development of my career into the judiciary,” she told the audience.

Several speakers also shared how Hogg played an instrumental role in launching and shaping their own careers in the law.

Osgoode Professor Jinyan Li, who is now a co-author of Hogg’s tax law text, remembered coming to Canada from China in 1985 and joining the Osgoode faculty as a young scholar and mother in 1999, when Hogg was dean. Soon after, he invited her to join him in writing a new edition of Principles of Canadian Income Tax Law.

“When I got the trust of the great Peter, it was such a validation of my potential,” she said. “I used the freedom he gave me liberally and he never complained. The only thing he said to me at one point was, ‘You have to make it simpler.’

“I became a better writer and also a better teacher, but most importantly I became a better citizen,” she added. “Peter has meant so much to me and I’m very happy I’m part of today’s event.”

Former Osgoode Dean and Professor Mary Condon has been appointed as a member of the Central Bank of Ireland Commission for a five-year term beginning Jan. 1, 2024.

In the part-time role, Condon will join Central Bank of Ireland Governor Gabriel Makhlouf and the other members of the commission in carrying out its mandate to ensure that the statutory functions of the central bank are properly discharged. Her appointment was announced recently by Ireland’s Minister for Finance Michael McGrath.

Condon, a dual citizen of Canada and Ireland, said the opportunity will open fascinating new vistas to inform her longstanding research into securities law and financial regulation.

“One of the unique features of the Irish central bank is that it is responsible for regulating almost the entire financial sector in the country,” she explained.

“It’s responsible for regulating banking, insurance, capital markets and investment funds, which is quite different from the approach in Canada – where jurisdiction is either provincial or federal with respect to different components of the financial sector.”

She said the experience will be an interesting opportunity to see first-hand the differences in approach when the same regulator oversees different industries and institutions within the financial system.

Ireland, which remains a member of the European Union (EU), has had one of the fastest growing economies in Europe in recent years.

“They’ve had to adopt policies and laws that are EU-wide,” noted Condon. “So I’ll also be able to understand the EU dimensions of the financial regulatory system in more detail, as well.”

While some countries, like the United States, have multiple regulators at the state and federal levels, other nations, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, have adopted an approach that involves fewer regulators, she explained. Both Australia and the U.K. have separated the regulation of market conduct, in which financial services firms interact with clients, from so-called prudential regulation, which is aimed at ensuring the safety and soundness of financial institutions like banks. Ireland is unique in combining it all under one roof.

Condon has until recently served as a member of an advisory council to Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) CEO Grant Vingoe. In addition, she is a former vice-chair, commissioner and board member of the OSC, and in early 2018 she was appointed as a member of the board of the Capital Markets Authority Implementation Organization (CMAIO), an interim body that was set up to assist with the establishment of a capital markets regulatory authority for co-operating jurisdictions in Canada.

She served as dean of Osgoode Hall Law School from July 1, 2019 to Aug. 31, 2023 and as interim dean from May 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. In 2018, she was selected as one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada (Public Sector Category) by the Toronto-based Women’s Executive Network. Between 2014 and 2016 she served as a member of Canada’s National Steering Committee for Financial Literacy. Her research interests are focused on securities law and financial regulation, pensions and feminist legal studies.

Who really owns your body – in life or in death?

It’s a fundamental legal question that has long fascinated Osgoode doctoral student Joshua Shaw – especially when it comes to death.

“How we dispose of the dead or body parts is often connected to broader relationships of power, which is interesting to me,” said Shaw, who currently serves as a lecturer in law at Kent Law School at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

The native of Brandon, Man., who expects to complete his PhD at Osgoode in early 2024, has titled his dissertation The Heteronomy of Flesh: A Minor Jurisprudence of the Use of the Human Dead and Tissues. Earlier this year, he was named as a 2023 co-recipient of the prestigious Austin Sarat Award, which is presented each year to a graduate or professional student for an outstanding paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. His paper, excerpted from his dissertation, is titled Humic Lawscapes.

“What is done with a body part or a dead body can often be quite sacred or even just a personally important decision,” said Shaw. “I would like to see laws that give individuals or communities the power to make their own determinations or decisions about what is done.”

Historically, that’s been far from the case – especially for marginalized groups. Weak laws, in turn, have helped lead to tragedies like the burial of Indigenous residential school students in unmarked graves in Canada or, globally, the trade in human body parts. Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that analyzes illicit financial flows, estimates that organ trafficking conservatively generates approximately US$840 million to $1.7 billion annually from about 12,000 illegal transplants.

In his dissertation, Shaw looks at the historical example of William Ramsay Smith, a Scottish physician, educator, naturalist and anthropologist who worked as a coroner in Australia in the early 1900s. His reputation was tarnished in 1903 when he was charged with the misuse of human remains. Despite this, he was later reinstated as a coroner and used his position to illicitly dissect and collect human remains of Aboriginal Australians.

“He was one of the major donors of Indigenous remains to the University of Edinburgh,” explained Shaw. “But this sense of having authority over the use of body parts, ostensibly in the public interest, ostensibly in serving scientific study, has been used to take tissues away from people and has often formed part of quite gross racist institutions.”

Shaw delves into some of these issues in the courses he is teaching this year at Kent Law School: Law and Medical Ethics, Healthcare Law and Ethics, Regulation of Healthcare and Assisted Dying.

As he explains in his Kent Law faculty bio, his critical and theoretical study of law, medicine and the dead has relevance to ethics and public policy, including the regulation of surgery, anatomy, synthetic biology, mortuary practices, and organ and tissue donation and transplantation.

“The history and contemporary issues in this area of law provide a lot of insight into how we approach or understand the human body and what we prioritize or value in terms of what is done with the body,” he explained. “And I think that’s what motivated me initially to focus on this area and continues to motivate me.”

Shaw’s doctoral research has been supported, in part, by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).