Before the school year began, Queen’s Law professors spent the summer advancing legal scholarship and shaping policy. From writing books and articles to presenting at international conferences, they tackled diverse topics such as COVID public health compliance, the criminal rate of interest, political constitutions, and the impact of generative AI on teaching and learning. Their work continues to contribute to important legal conversations globally. Here’s a glimpse of some of the most exciting recent projects our faculty members have been working on. 

Dean Colleen M. Flood collaborated with her Machine M.D. research team to draft articles on the regulation of artificial intelligence in healthcare. They included JD students Laura Zhang and Rick Xu in their work and tackled crucial topics like informed consent, physician liability, and health information privacy and cybersecurity. Dean Flood also co-authored a lead article for an upcoming symposium in HealthcarePapers, marking the 40th anniversary of the Canada Health Act and exploring potential reforms to meet today’s challenges. Additionally, her latest volume, Borders, Boundaries, and Pandemics (Routledge, 2024), co-edited with Y.Y. Chen, Raywat Deonandan, Sam Halabi, and Sophie Thérault, was released this spring and is available open access.

Joshua Karton made (a little) progress on his book manuscript entitled Contracts All the Way Down: A Contractarian Theory of Arbitration (for which he was recently awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant), presented his research at international arbitration events in Hong Kong and Salzburg, lectured in Berlin (for the International Law Programs), London, and Toronto, and finished co-editing a volume, Research Methods Handbook for Contract Law and Scholarship, which will be published later this year. He also took up the reins as the Law Faculty’s new Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Program Development.

Lisa Kelly presented research from her book project, Courting Danger: How the School Safety Revolution Transformed Student Life, at the annual Law & Society Conference in Denver, Colorado. Tracing the modern rise of school safety discourse, she showed how school officials and political leaders invoked a language of anarchy and disorder, rather than safety, to describe and suppress student protest in 1968. This differs markedly from contemporary struggles over campus and school life where various actors deploy competing claims of “safety” to advance their political positions. She also presented on evidence issues for newly appointed provincial judges in Bromont, Quebec.

Lisa Kerr finalized three articles for publication. One explores the place of Gladue in constitutional law and another examines the degree to which Gladue is an exceptional approach to sentencing. A final paper is co-authored with Crown prosecutor Michael Perlin, Law’09, and examines the legitimacy and proper scope of reasonable hypotheticals for considering mandatory minimum sentences under s. 12 of the Charter. She presented a paper at the Law and Society Conference in Montreal and at the Osgoode Constitutional Case Conference. She also lectured at a judicial education conference in Winnipeg, placed two editorials in the Globe & Mail and appeared on the Asper Centre podcast on the history of the protection against cruel and unusual punishment. 

Benjamin Ewing gave a presentation on “Affirmative Action in Criminal Justice” at the 2024 meeting of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) in Seoul, South Korea. His paper “Youth as Moral Opportunity” was selected in a competitive open call for the 2024 OxJuris/Legal Theory Conference. He also finalized the chapter “Whataboutism at Sentencing?” to be published in Responding to the Culpable State: Is Sentence Mitigation Appropriate?, edited by Leo Zaibert, Julian V. Roberts, and Jesper Ryberg (Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming). Additionally, he began his first sabbatical by focusing on a new project on the limitations of a “meritocratic” approach to criminal justice.

Debra Haak presented papers at three conferences – Law and Society Association (Denver, USA), Canadian Law and Society Association (Université du Québec à Montréal) and Canadian Association of Law Teachers (University of New Brunswick). As part of her “Sex in the Age of Gender” project funded by SSHRC and the Canadian Bar Association Law for the Future Fund, she supervised JD students Heon Lee, Isabella Bianchi, and Javeria Baig examining decisions of human rights tribunals and the Supreme Court of Canada to identify how the word “sex” has been defined and used in promoting and protecting human rights in Canada. She also worked on her manuscript about commercial sex laws in Canada – Exploiting Inequality (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press) and celebrated her daughter’s graduation from Queen’s Artsci’24.

Gail Henderson’s article on the criminal rate of interest, co-authored with Katlin Abrahamson, Law’23, was published in the Dalhousie Law Journal. In May, she participated in the Banff Capital Markets Roundtable, hosted by University of Calgary in Lake Louise, and presented at the Canadian Association of Law Teachers annual conference, hosted by the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. She will be contributing two chapters to a forthcoming book on the Canadian Financial Diaries Research Project.

Sharry Aiken presented an early draft of new work on reflective practice with Michele Leering, PhD’23, at the Canadian Association of Law Teachers conference in Fredericton and co-authored a paper with Colin Grey for a forthcoming issue of the Supreme Court Law Review on the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement.

Nicholas Bala is leading a SSHRC-funded project to improve Canada’s family justice system. In June, he presented a study on litigation abuse, co-authored with Law’23 grads Ella Benedetti and Sydney Franzmann, at an international conference in Boston, with the study forthcoming in Family Court Review. His collaboration with Western Social Work professor Rachel Birnbaum and Jessica Farshait, Law’25, on children resisting parental contact and parental alienation resulted in several publications and a presentation at the National Family Law Program in Halifax in July. He is also studying systemic discrimination and family violence in Ontario’s Peel Region, focusing on challenges faced by its large racialized and immigrant populations. In a fourth project, involving Western Law professor Claire Houston, Law’07, he is exploring the long-term effects on court-imposed shared parenting.

Lindsay Borrows is co-editing a Special Issue for the Review of Constitutional Studies with Professor Jessica Eisen, a 2024-25 Queen’s Visiting Scholar from University of Alberta Law. The Special Issue explores Indigenous and common law perspectives on legal relations with animals, plants, water, land, and air. Professor Borrows’ article forthcoming in the Special Issue examines how the Anishinaabe legal order constitutes itself in relation to plant life and the ways this can support our collective efforts to address climate change and biodiversity loss, especially in the Great Lakes region. She is creating a new intensive course that will take place entirely at the Queen’s University Elbow Lake Environmental Education Centre. The course will examine Anishinaabe environmental law and include land-based learning, and teachings from several Anishinaabe knowledge-keepers.

Mohamed Khimji presented on vexatious registrations in PPS registries at the Canadian Personal Property Security Law Conference Annual Meeting in St. John’s on June 25 and on the impact of generative AI on teaching and learning at the LETS International Symposium, hosted by the IBLAM School of Law in Indonesia, on July 18. He has also been appointed a member of the Ontario Bar Association’s PPSL Committee and is working on a paper analyzing the impact of registry abuses on the cost of borrowing in Article 9 and PPSA jurisdictions. He will be presenting the paper at the Canadian Commercial Law Symposium at the University of Ottawa on Sept. 21 and at the Emerging Issues in Business Conference at the Schulich School of Law on Sept. 27. 

Erik S. Knutsen presented “Insurance Policy Interpretation at the Edges of Coverage” at the International Conference on Contract Law at the University of Bristol, U.K. He also gave two presentations on torts to the National Judicial Institute’s Civil Law National Conference in Halifax, N.S. He was elected to the editorial board of the American Bar Association’s influential Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Law Journal. He worked on a new co-authored draft of the Irwin Law book Civil Litigation and updated his American insurance law treatise, Stempel & Knutsen on Insurance Coverage. He also wrote drafts of a new treatise on Canadian insurance coverage, and a new insurance law casebook.

Cherie Metcalf, Associate Dean for Research, began a project examining the role of private litigation to enforce public regulation with collaborators from Emory, USC, and Stanford, and researched climate adaptation with a University of Arizona collaborator. She presented her work at five universities: Florida State, George Mason, Arizona State, Ottawa, and Michigan. She finalized her chapter, “The Corporation and the Fallacy of the Public-Private Divide,” for the forthcoming book Fallacies of Corporate & Finance Law, co-edited by Claire Hill, Saule Omarova & Alexandra Andhov. She organized environmental sessions for the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, supervised three graduate students, and three JD research assistants working on her SSHRC project, “Institutions for Effective Climate Action.”

Darryl Robinson worked as a guest editor on a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights, concerning ecocide, human rights, and environmental justice. The special issue attracted over 60 proposals from all regions of the world. He completed a chapter on international environmental crimes and the proposed crime of ecocide for the Research Handbook on Environmental Crimes and Criminal Enforcement. He also worked on a contribution about the link between peace and the law of crimes against humanity, for the Encyclopedia of Law and Peace.

Ashwini Vasanthakumar completed a chapter for a volume celebrating the work of Queen’s Law colleague Les Green, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She began drafting a book, Against Integration: on how to be a good immigrant, under contract with Polity, as well as an article on “Victim-Blaming and Victims’ Duties.” With student research assistant Arun Balendran, Law’26, she conducted interviews for her SSHRC-funded project on transitional justice in Sri Lanka. Under the Student Summer Research Fellowship program, she supervised the research of Sandra Malinouskaya, Law’25, into citizenship deprivation in Belarus.

Grégoire Webber completed a draft of Political Constitutions, a forthcoming manuscript with Cambridge University Press’s Elements in the Philosophy of Law, and presented that project with co-author Graham Gee at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow. He presented draft work on the separation of powers in Madrid at the International Society of Public Law’s annual conference, as well as forthcoming work on the responsibilities of government at the University of Ottawa. He also spent the summer on another manuscript project in the philosophy of law, exploring our vulnerability in the pursuit of value.

Jacob Weinrib presented papers at the Public Law Conference in Ottawa, the Legal Theory Workshop at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the International Public Law Conference in Madrid. He also completed a chapter entitled “Constitutional Justification” for his forthcoming book, The Impasse of Constitutional Rights (Cambridge University Press).

Robert Yalden participated in the 7th International Takeover Bid Regulators Conference in Toronto in May as the lead speaker on dual class share structures, and as a panellist discussing the Supreme Court of Canada’s BCE decision on directors’ duties. He led a team of co-authors including Professor Khimji in preparing a new edition of Yalden et al., Business Organizations: Practice, Theory and Emerging Challenges (2025). He also advanced his SSHRC-funded work on Democratic legitimacy of rulemaking in Canadian securities law, and will present initial conclusions at a September conference on “Emerging Issues in Business Law” at Dalhousie University. In 2024-25 he will be a Visiting Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford University, and a Senior Visiting Academic in the Commercial Law Centre of Oxford’s Faculty of Law.

(Last updated Oct. 9)