The Faculty is pleased to welcome three accomplished faculty members joining U of T Law, effective July 1, 2022:
Assistant Professor Abdi Aidid
Assistant Professor Abdi Aidid received his BA from the University of Toronto, his JD from Yale Law School and his LLM from University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. He researches and teaches in the areas of torts, procedure and law & technology.
Professor Aidid previously practiced litigation and arbitration at Covington & Burling LLP in New York City and most recently served as the VP, Legal Research at Blue J, where he oversaw the development of machine learning-enabled research and analytics tools. Professor Aidid is a Faculty Affiliate at U of T's Centre for Ethics and a member of the Ethics of AI Lab. Prior to joining U of T Law full-time, he served as an Adjunct Professor.
Professor Aidid will be teaching first-year Torts as well as an upper-year course on alternative dispute resolution.
Assistant Professor Jean-Christophe Bédard-Rubin
Assistant Professor Jean-Christophe Bédard-Rubin's work explores Canadian constitutional culture from historical and comparative perspectives. He studied law, political science, and philosophy at Université Laval, Yale University, and the University of Toronto. During his doctoral studies, Jean-Christophe was the McMurty Fellow of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholar. He has done consultancy work on constitution-building for International IDEA and, prior to his graduate studies, he worked in litigation for the Quebec Department of Justice.
Bédard-Rubin currently pursues two main research projects. The first is an intellectual history of the foundations of public law in French Canada. This project seeks to reconstruct the intellectual networks in which French Canadian public lawyers participated to excavate the transatlantic influences on the formation of Quebec’s legal syncretism. This genealogical reconstruction recovers the conceptual and theoretical innovations that allowed French Canadians to articulate a genuine theory of the state outside of the revolutionary framework. In so doing, this work sheds a different, somewhat oblique light on Canada’s constitutional experience and questions its status in comparative constitutional scholarship.
The second research project investigates judicial bilingualism in Canada. Using mixed social science methods, this project explores the various empirical impacts of bilingualism on judicial behaviour, the normative significance of legal bilingualism for the authority of judicial decisions, and the ways in which language shapes the dominant conception of the judicial role in Canada’s French and English public spheres.
Jean-Christophe’s work has been published in English and French in the Review of Constitutional Studies, the Canadian Journal of Law & Society, the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, the Bulletin d’histoire politique, and the International Journal of Canadian Studies, amongst others.
Professor John Borrows
The Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law
Photo by David Ball
Professor John Borrows, BA, MA, JD, LLM (Toronto), PhD (Osgoode Hall Law School), Hon. LLD. (Dalhousie, Law Society of Ontario, York University, Queen's University, Simon Fraser University). Hon. DHL (Toronto), FRSC, OC, has been named the inaugural Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law. He is a member of the Chippewa of the Nawash First Nation in Ontario.
Professor Borrows previously held the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Victoria, he was Professor and Robina Chair in Law and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School and Professor; Law Foundation Professor of Aboriginal Law and Justice at the University of Victoria Law School; Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto; Associate Professor and First Nations Legal Studies Director, Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia; and Associate Professor and Director of the Intensive Programme in Lands, Resources and First Nations Governments at Osgoode Hall Law School.
Borrows has edited and authored several award-winning books. His publications include, Recovering Canada; The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Donald Smiley Award for the best book in Canadian Political Science, 2002), Canada's Indigenous Constitution (Canadian Law and Society Best Book Award 2011), Drawing Out Law: A Spirit's Guide (2010), Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism (Donald Smiley Award for the best book in Canadian Political Science, 2016), The Right Relationship (with Michael Coyle, ed.), Resurgence and Reconciliation (with Michael Asch, Jim Tully, eds.), Law’s Indigenous Ethics (NAISA best subsequent book), all from the University of Toronto Press. He has received the Killam Prize (2017) and the Molson Prize (2019), both from the Canada Council for the Arts; the Governor General’s Innovation Award (2020); and the Canadian Bar Association President’s Award (2021). He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2020.
In January, Professor John Borrows will begin teaching a new course to all first-year U of T Law students that addresses the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ laws with Canada's laws.
