�Ӱ�ԭ��

Professor Zoran Oklopcic

This course examines the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms not as a fixed body of doctrine but as a site of enduring political, theoretical, and comparative contestation. Beginning with the Charter’s origins in the patriation of 1982—and the questions of legitimacy, popular authorization, and unfinished consent that surround it—the course approaches rights as artifacts of constitutional design and imagination rather than as self-evident entitlements. Across the term we ask who “the people” of the Charter are, what work rights actually do, and how Canada’s framework compares with constitutional rights regimes elsewhere. This year’s topics will include: the structure and legitimacy of the Charter and the amending process; the limitation of rights and the proportionality (Oakes) framework in comparative perspective; the notwithstanding clause and the relationship between popular sovereignty and judicial review; fundamental freedoms; equality and the recognition of difference; collective, minority, and language rights; the place of Indigenous peoples and Quebec within the constitutional order; and critical and comparative challenges to rights discourse. The emphasis throughout is on theoretically informed, contextual analysis rather than exhaustive doctrinal coverage. Particular topics, cases, and readings are selected at the instructor’s discretion and may change.

Professor Steve Tasson

This course focuses on developing critical, practical, and effective presentation and oral advocacy strategies and skills for legal studies students. Alongside this focus on skills-building, the course will also explore the historical and contemporary justifications for, and dynamics of, oral advocacy in common law systems. Why does oral argumentation continue to occupy such a central place in legal and political decision-making? Regular and collaborative in-class participation is a core feature of the course design and vital to student success. Evaluations are conducted principally through oral advocacy exercises, including: mooting, debates, committee presentations and more traditional academic presentations. 

Professor Alberto Salazar

Unlock the future of Business Law: Join our seminar on Corporate Law and Artificial Intelligence! Delve into the exciting realm of Canadian and comparative corporate law, exploring the transformative impact of the new technology.  Discover how algorithms, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, automation, smart contracts, and platform corporations are reshaping the business landscape and traditional business law. Our course covers a wide range of topics, including the legal implications of financial technology (e.g. investment platforms, cryptocurrency), the changing landscape of fiduciary duties of corporate directors (e.g. AI directors, liability for privacy breaches, algorithmic management, consumer’s rights), the transformation of work (e.g. AI-driven unemployment, workplace algorithms, gig workers), antitrust (e.g. regulation of big tech companies and platform corporations), and corporate social responsibility (e.g. AI’s environmental impact). Don’t miss out on this opportunity to explore the future of business law in the digital age!

Professor Sean Richmond

This interdisciplinary seminar examines key theories of the role and limits of international law in international politics; relevant legal rules shaping this relationship; and how these theories and rules apply to important historical and contemporary case studies. It assesses how law and politics interact in areas such as the use of military force by states; international criminal law; the law of the sea and outer space; and international protection of the environment. The seminar is aimed at fourth-year students who have pre-existing knowledge of international law. Active participation in the discussions is expected. Practice problems and current events will be employed to help students apply the theories and rules that are explored to the real world of foreign affairs. Exciting guest speakers will also provide insights on cutting-edge issues such as Indigenous trade relations.

Professor Jane Dickson

This is a course about how law works (or doesn’t work) in real time.

Since 1999 Canadian courts sentencing an Indigenous person have been required to consider their ‘unique background and circumstances’ and any ‘alternatives to incarceration that are reasonable in the circumstances’ of the offence and the offender. Since that time, these ‘Gladue requirements’ have been expanded to apply across the criminal process, from bail through to parole applications.

Despite working with the requirements for 25 years, Gladue’s goal of reducing Indigenous incarceration rates remains beyond our reach and Indigenous people remain disproportionately represented at virtually every level of the system from police contacts to incarceration. So what’s the problem? Is it Gladue? Is it courts, lawyers, cops, corrections? Is it that we failed to understand the complexity of the factors that bring people into conflict with the law? Or was Gladue based on flawed assumptions about the system and the society that supports it, and thus the failure is no real surprise? Is this yet another example of how bad policy can thwart law’s best intentions?

This course will immerse you in the research and evaluations around Indigenous criminal justice system involvement, Gladue and critical discussions of the nature of culpability, accountability and ‘what works’. You will then have the opportunity to engage with those on the front lines of the criminal justice system – police, judges, defense and Crown counsel, Gladue writers and workers – to discuss their understanding of, and role in, decarceration.

You will have the opportunity to ask some hard questions and get honest answers from the people doing the actual work and to query connections between theory and practice and between research and the real world.

Because the real-world matters and ready or not, it’s on your doorstep.

Professor Michael Christensen

This course examines some of the socio-legal issues related to the recent expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The course will be organized as a seminar and each week we will discuss foundational topics in the growing field of AI studies. The readings will be multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on questions about the social impact of AI technologies ranging from practical issues regarding copyright and training models, to larger more existential questions about the future of work and human interaction in the AI era. The course will consider many perspectives and voices that are currently impacting debates about AI, including academic, industry, media, and activist perspectives. The goal of the course is to provide a platform for understanding the latest developments in AI products and technologies from a socio-legal academic perspective.

Professor Doris Buss

This is an action research course, examining how park users make sense of, and navigate rules governing trails in the Gatineau Park and National Capital Commission (NCC) green-spaces. Students in this course will study and employ advanced research skills of interviewing and participation observation. Topics covered will include theoretical materials on law and geography; regulation of parks and the National Capital Commission; relationships between human and non-human worlds, and socio-legal research on law in everyday life.

If you are a student interested in learning through doing, attending class in person while open to course work that takes you off campus in Ottawa, and if you are interested in exploring how to conduct research on socio-legal dynamics in everyday life, then this course is for you.

Students MUST BE based in Ottawa during the semester, and able to attend class in-person.

Professor Megan Gaucher

Citizenship and immigration continue to be important legal issues, particularly in Canada where the welcoming and subsequent accommodation of immigrants and refugees is a longstanding part of the national imaginary. Debates on admission criteria, migrant rights, and the legal limits of integration/accommodation dominate academic and non-academic circles alike. Moreover, the question of “who belongs,” continues to underpin political and popular opinion, drawing attention to the complexity of narratives of membership and belonging. The Canadian story of multiculturalism, while no doubt pleasant, often glosses over the inequalities that immigrants and refugees experience both in seeking access to Canadian borders and integrating into Canadian society. This course will introduce students to a theoretical and empirical examination of these questions, while considering the lived experiences of immigrants and refugees. In our examination of topics including, but not limited to, citizenship/non-citizenship, statelessness, temporary foreign labour, family reunification, refugee determination, and migrant policing/criminalization, this course will address the gap between immigration and refugee law and the implications of these laws in practice.

Instructor Kelly Lauzon

In this class, we will rely on Canadian and American research to examine and analyze the factors that have been linked to wrongful conviction cases. We will use this knowledge to study known cases of wrongful conviction within the Canadian justice system to help us consider the implications that a wrongful conviction has for the accused person who is subsequently exonerated. In doing so, we will attempt to answer a variety of questions such as what impact do wrongful conviction cases have on the credibility of the criminal justice system? How do the state and the justice system respond when people complain that they have been wrongfully convicted? What role do police, crown attorneys, judiciary and other justice officials play in wrongful conviction cases? What impact do wrongful convictions have on the lives of the wrongfully convicted and their families? Finally, can anything be done to reduce the frequency with which people are wrongfully convicted by the criminal justice system in the future?

Professor Evelyn Maeder

Exploration of psychological phenomena in the legal system. Discussion of theory and method, level of analysis, and limits to understanding. Application of psychological principles to multiple stages/actors within the legal process, with particular focus on the criminal legal system. Students will engage with psycholegal scholarship from Canadian, U.S., and global contexts.

Professor Ania Zbyszewska

The seminar examines how law constitutes, organizes, and regulates labour across historical and contemporary contexts, drawing on critical feminist, decolonial, heterodox political economy, and ecological perspectives. We will analyze how legal regimes shape labour processes and inequality, and evaluate policy and regulatory responses to exclusions, gaps, and misfits amid technological, socio‑ecological, and global transformations. We will also explore imaginaries that decenter paid/productive work to foreground care, community, sustainability, and socially useful labour. Themes include work and labour; labouring bodies; temporalities and spaces of work; labour in supply chains and migration; socio‑ecologies of work; solidarities and resistance; and post‑work utopias. Through close reading, seminar discussion, and analytical writing grounded in theoretical and empirical materials, students assess how labour’s meanings are made and remade, and whether law can participate in, the constitution of post‑work, more‑than‑capitalist worlds.