This course provides students with the fundamentals of family law. Beyond marriage and divorce, topics will include determination of parentage, domestic contacts, rights of unmarried cohabitants, and alternate dispute resolution processes. Both Federal and Ontario statutes and regulations will be examined, along with leading cases.

This course focuses on Aboriginal law in Canada, Crown-Indigenous relations, and the legal landscape of negotiation, modern agreements, and partnerships with Indigenous communities. It will cover significant legal touch points starting from first contact, including key legal decisions, treaty-making, and the Indian Act. In so doing, it will explore the ways in which Canadian courts have grappled with legal questions relating to Aboriginal rights, title, and sovereignty. From there, the course will examine the evolving Canadian legal approach to consultation and consent, including recent legal developments related to UNDRIP. It will also examine the development of modern agreements and partnerships, the role of the courts in overseeing and interpreting these contracts, and how/whether modern agreements have contributed to economic reconciliation with Indigenous communities.

This course will provide students with the foundations required to understand how data intersects with the health legal and regulatory environment. Students will learn how foundational principles in respect of privacy, cybersecurity, enterprise risk management, intellectual property, compliance, data governance, analytics/research, and artificial intelligence relate to a variety of health-related settings. In particular, the course will provide students with the tools to either be key data advisors to those in the health system or to understand and apply the concepts to become data leaders in the field.

The course will also ensure that students understand the various roles that form part of health-care delivery across Canada and how to apply these data law principles such that they are managed effectively and lawfully for optimal implementation, leadership, and governance.

With an increase in global migration, Canada has emerged as a leader in immigration law and policy. Government pathways and categories for accepting new immigrants are intended to balance the needs to the Canadian economy, while meeting Canada's human rights obligations and responding to international crises.

This course will focus on providing a foundation for exploring which immigration pathways exist for both temporary and permanent immigration to Canada. Students will be expected to engage in thoughtful discussion about current Canadian immigration policy, while benefiting from a range of guest speakers who are experts in their respect area of practice within Canadian immigration law.

At present there is an unprecedented and ongoing world-wide conversation about how to resolve contentious constitutional questions. There is, in other words, more convergence over answers to constitutional questions and less divergence than has been seen in modern times. A part of that conversation concerns which precedents, issuing out of which jurisdictions, provide models for judicial decision making and which should be strenuously avoided.

This seminar will examine a sub-set of what might be called the comparative constitutional law canon. Of interest will be the various jurisdictions and cases that serve as both models of constitutional analysis and as anti-models. The focus for discussion this year will be on the role of courts in protecting democracy, with a special emphasis on democratic transition and democratic backsliding. Selected regional approaches, some constitutional theory, and historic moments that inform contemporary constitutional analysis will be examined.