2008: A Record Year in Research Funding for Queen’s Law

2008 SSHRC grant recipient Professor Sharryn Aiken.

Queen's Law faculty members received a record amount of grant funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in 2008 to conduct interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research projects. Five professors were awarded funding for projects in which they are the sole researcher and/or the directors or co-investigators of research teams.

Professor Sharryn Aiken and Associate Dean Arthur Cockfield, Law '93, were successful co-applicants for major, international multidisciplinary research projects which received a total of $4.6 million in funding. Aiken is part of the Canadian Refugee Research Network, which received $2.1 million, and Cockfield is a member of the Surveillance Project, which received $2.5 million. Each of these teams received the maximum funding amount available in its category. For information about these projects, see http://law.queensu.ca/news/archives/may2008/aikenResearchGrant.html and http://law.queensu.ca/news/archives/february2008/artCockfieldSuccessfulCoApplicant.html

 

 

2008 SSHRC grant recipients: Professors Arthur Cockfield, Nicholas Bala, Mark Walters and Tsvi Kahana.

Cockfield, Professor Nicholas Bala, Law '77, Professor Tsvi Kahana and Associate Dean Mark Walters, Law '89, were awarded a total of more than $540,000 in Standard Research Grant funding for their individual and team projects.


Bala is the Principal Investigator for an interdisciplinary team that received another three years of SSHRC funding ($165,000 from 2008 to 2011) to study issues related to child witnesses in the criminal courts. The team's research will include studies of children's true and false statements to determine whether there are reliable indicia of lying, studies of the ability of adults to accurately assess the credibility of children, and a review of caselaw under the recently enacted changes to the laws governing child witnesses (Bill C-2).

Bala was also a co-applicant for an interdisciplinary research project awarded $135,000 to study high-conflict divorces. With faculty members from two other Ontario universities specializing in social work, psychology and nursing, Bala will be developing screening tools to better deal with high-conflict separations and explore issues such as the effects of domestic violence on custody decisions.

"A central part of this project is trying to better understand the dynamics of high-conflict separations, better differentiate between kinds of high-conflict separations, including an assessment of the level of conflict and the potential for future violence and also understand how these cases are being dealt with by the court system," said Bala.

The team will use the grant funds to conduct primary research and co-author articles and books.


Cockfield received $77,750 in funding for his sole interdisciplinary project entitled "Protecting Taxpayer Privacy under Enhanced Cross-border Tax Information Exchanges: A Law and Technology Perspective."

"I have three different research strands - tax law, privacy law and cross-border transfers of information, and law and technology theory," said Cockfield. "For the first time, I'm trying to bring them together in this project."

Through an analysis of existing and proposed Canadian laws and policies involving the sharing of tax information across borders, Cockfield aims to determine whether reform efforts are required in order to promote optimal economic, social and political outcomes. Enabled by the grant funding to conduct the first comprehensive and critical examination of cross-border tax sharing, he hopes to advance international tax law knowledge. Further, Cockfield's work is expected to produce recommended changes to some Canadian tax laws and policies, as well as changes at the international level.


Kahana, a co-applicant with Professor Sara Slinn of Osgoode Hall Law School received a $57,977 grant for the project "Employer Speech: Effects and Limits of Employer Anti-Union Campaigns During Union Organizing." The project addresses employee rights to choose whether to have collective representation by a union and the constitutional right of employers to freedom of expression. Focussing on employer speech during the unionization process, when many employers try to discourage their employees from joining a union, the project's goal is to shed light on the conflict that often occurs between employers and workers with respect to their rights and interests.

"We will examine this conflict empirically, theoretically and doctrinally," said Kahana, "and will explore and suggest new perspectives which would be useful for labour tribunals, judges, and other law and policy makers."


Walters was awarded $110,750 as the sole researcher for the project "The Jurisprudence of Reconciliation: Towards an ‘Intersocietal' Conception of the Rule of Law in Canada." In this project, Walters seeks to determine whether a theory of the rule of law synthesizing both indigenous and non-indigenous traditions can be articulated in Canada.

Weaving together two distinct lines of inquiry, he will evaluate legal theories that underlie the common Supreme Court of Canada assertion that the rule of law is a "fundamental postulate of our constitutional structure," and investigate evolving approaches to legality within Canadian Aboriginal communities that underlie assertions like those made by one Aboriginal chief that "ours is a nation of law."

"There is confusion about what this most basic tenet of the Canadian constitutional order means when it comes to resolving outstanding Aboriginal claims," said Walters. "This confusion has implications at the barricades that divide opposing communities, but it also reaches into constitutional interpretation and affects how judges think about the place of indigenous peoples and traditions within the Canadian constitutional structure."

With his funding, Walters plans to hire graduate students to conduct empirical research in several First Nations communities, to assess how Aboriginal attitudes toward the rule of law have evolved over time and whether uniquely indigenous legal perspectives have helped to shape those attitudes.


About the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

A federal agency promoting and supporting university-based research and training in social science and the humanities, SSHRC facilitates collaboration and the sharing of knowledge across research disciplines, universities and society to achieve excellence in these areas of research.

To find out about the exceptional research being undertaken by all Queen's Law faculty members, please see the faculty web pages at http://law.queensu.ca/facultyAndStaff/facultyAndStaffDirectory.html and the new research web page at http://law.queensu.ca/lawResearch.html .