Bram Abramson
Open Web Fellow, Mozilla Foundation
Panel 3: Responsibility for Defamation and the Problem of Intermediaries
Bram Abramson is currently an Open Web Fellow with Mozilla Foundation, hosted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab; and serves as a director of the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services, panel member with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, and lecturer at Ryerson University’s School of Creative Industries. Past roles include head of law, regulation, and public policy at TekSavvy, an independent telco; media and telecom lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault; and senior analyst at the CRTC (Ottawa) and TeleGeography (Washington, DC).
Christina Angelopoulos
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL), University of Cambridge
Panel 3: Responsibility for Defamation and the Problem of Intermediaries
Christina Angelopoulos is a lecturer in intellectual property at the University of Cambridge and a member of CIPIL (Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). She specialises in copyright, with a particular focus on intermediary liability. From 2011 to 2015, she wrote her PhD on the European harmonisation of the liability of online intermediaries for the copyright infringements of third parties at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam. Her thesis was published by Kluwer Law International in 2016 under the title “European Intermediary Liability in Copyright”.
Jane Bailey
Full Professor, Common Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa; The eQuality Project Co-Leader
Panel 2: The Harms and Values Underlying Defamation Law in the Internet Age
Jane Bailey is a Full Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa where she conducts research and teaches about the intersections of law, technology and equality. She and Dr Valerie Steeves co-lead The eQuality Project, a 7-year SSHRC funded partnership of researchers, educators, advocates, civil society groups, and policymakers who are interested in examining the impact of online commercial profiling on children’s identities and social relationships. Jane leads the Project stream focused on cyberviolence and vulnerable youth. Among her proudest professional achievements are co-leading The eGirls Project (with Valerie Steeves), creating and teaching a first-year law course called Cyberfeminism and, in her former life as a litigator, assisting as counsel in the first online hate propagation case to be heard by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Jane was honoured to receive the Canadian Bar Association’s 2015 Ramon John Hnatyshyn award for outstanding contributions to Canadian law and legal scholarship and to be named a Member of the New College of the Royal Society of Canada in 2016. She has presented her work on tech-facilitated violence against women and girls, youth perspectives on online defamation, and girls’ experiences with privacy and equality in online social networks at local, national and international conferences, and in invited testimony before numerous parliamentary committees. In fall 2018 she will be a Visiting Professor at Hong Kong University and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
Jamie Cameron
Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Panel 1: Rethinking Defamation Law: The Setting for Reform
Professor Jamie Cameron has been a full-time member of the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1984. She holds law degrees from McGill University and Columbia University, clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for the Hon. Justice Brian Dickson, and was on the faculty at Cornell Law School before joining Osgoode. Today, Professor Cameron is one of Canada’s senior constitutional scholars, whose research and teaching interests focus on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of expression and the press, the Supreme Court of Canada, criminal law, American constitutional law, and judicial biography. She has written extensively in these areas; has been the editor and co-editor of a dozen book collections; and has chaired and co-chaired many conferences and events. She has been a Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association for more than 20 years (and past vice-president) and has represented the CCLA in cases at the Supreme Court of Canada. She has been on the Board of Editors for the Ontario Reports for more than 25 years and is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Free Expression (Ryerson University) and the Law Commission of Ontario’s Internet Defamation Advisory Board. Professor Cameron was appointed to the Ontario Review Board in 2013, and in 2018 was appointed to the Nunavut Review Board.
Giuseppina D’Agostino
Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Panel 3 Moderator: Responsibility for Defamation and the Problem of Intermediaries
Professor Pina D’Agostino joined the Osgoode Hall Law School faculty in 2006 and brings creativity and passion to her role as Founder and Director of IP Osgoode, Osgoode’s flagship Intellectual Property Law and Technology Program. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the IPilogue (www.iposgoode.ca), the first IP law blog of its kind, and Founder and Director of Osgoode’s IP Intensive and the Innovation Clinic, the first legal clinic of its kind helping start-ups. Before her Osgoode appointment, she was recruited by the federal government’s Recruitment of Policy Leaders (RPL) program for the Department of Canadian Heritage and worked at the Copyright Policy Branch. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Intellectual Property Journal (IPJ) and previously was an associate at a large firm in Toronto. Her research interests in the intellectual property, technology and innovation law and policy fields are wide-ranging and she is highly sought after as a public speaker and consultant. She is a cited authority at the Supreme Court of Canada and in various media, and is regularly called on by foreign and Canadian federal and provincial governments for advice. She testified before Parliament’s Legislative Committee on Canada’s ongoing copyright reform initiatives. She publishes on a range of issues and her two books, Copyright, Contract, Creators: New Media, New Rules and The Common Law of Intellectual Property: Essays in Honour of Professor David Vaver (edited with Catherine Ng and Lionel Bently) are widely available. Prof D’Agostino has been awarded various SSHRC grants for her work, more recently, “Triggering Innovation: Transnational Partnership for the Mobilization of Intellectual Property Policy and Practices” and “Fostering Innovation in Canada through Intellectual Property Law.” She is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), she serves as Director to the Alectra Inc. Board, Director to the Board of Trustees of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and was recently appointed to the Smart City Advisory Task Force of the City of Vaughan. Prof D’Agostino is the recipient of various honours and awards, has a Masters and Doctorate in Law with distinction (University of Oxford), an LLB (Osgoode Hall Law School), HonBA (summa cum laude, York University) and is a member of the Law Society of Ontario since 2001.
Peter Downard
Practitioner, Faskens
Panel 2 Moderator: The Harms and Values Underlying Defamation Law in the Internet Age
Peter Downard is a senior litigator and expert in defamation matters. With extensive experience acting as defamation counsel throughout litigation proceedings, he has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada, Ontario Court of Appeal for Ontario, trials and numerous mediations and advisory matters. Peter also has comprehensive experience in commercial litigation and alternative dispute resolution.
Peter is the author of The Law of Libel in Canada, referred to as an authority on libel law in numerous court decisions, and of the volume Defamation in Halsbury’s Laws of Canada.
Peter was one of three appointed members of the Attorney General of Ontario’s Advisory Panel on Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP), whose work resulted in the enactment of the Ontario Protection of Public Participation Act 2015.
Peter has been repeatedly recognized as a leading practitioner in defamation litigation in Lexpert, the Lexpert Guide to the Leading US/Canada Cross-Border Litigation Lawyers in Canada, Best Lawyers in Canada, and by Benchmark Canada as a ‘Litigation Star’.
Peter also has extensive experience as counsel in a wide range of civil litigation, administrative proceedings and public inquiries.
Kathy English
Public Editor, The Toronto Star
Lunchtime Debate on Front Line Issues: Unpublishing
Kathy English has served as the Star’s public editor since 2007. A veteran journalist, she has worked for six Canadian daily newspapers, launched websites for two Canadian media companies and is a former member of the faculty of Ryerson School of Journalism. The public editor’s office handles readers’ queries about accuracy and the Star’s journalistic standards as set out in its Newsroom Policy and Journalistic Standards Guide. The public editor looks into claims of error in all content on all platforms on which the Star publishes.
Trevor Farrow
Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Panel 4 Moderator: Resolving Online Defamation in the Internet Age
Trevor C.W. Farrow, AB (Princeton), BA/MA (Oxford), LLB (Dalhousie), LLM (Harvard), PhD (Alberta), is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he served as Associate Dean from 2014-2016. He is the Chair of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice and was the founding Academic Director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution. Professor Farrow’s teaching and research focus on the administration of civil justice, including legal process, legal and judicial ethics, advocacy, globalization and development. He was formerly a litigation lawyer at the Torys law firm in Toronto. Professor Farrow has received teaching awards from Harvard University and Osgoode Hall Law School.
Paul Schabas
Practitioner, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP
Lunchtime Debate on Frontline Issues: Jurisdiction
Paul is a senior trial and appellate counsel at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP in Toronto. He litigates a wide range of matters, from complex commercial litigation and arbitrations to white collar criminal, tax and regulatory matters. Paul is one of Canada’s leading media and constitutional lawyers, and has expertise in freedom of expression, legal and equality rights, division of powers and judicial independence issues. He has been counsel on many cases before the Supreme Court of Canada, including Grant v Torstar, Canadian Foundation for Children Youth and the Law, Breeden v Black, Toronto Star v Canada, and Morgentaler. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.
In 2016 Paul was elected Treasurer (President) of the Law Society of Ontario, the governing body for Ontario’s 50,000 lawyers, and over 8,000 paralegals, and has led the legal profession in the province for the past two years. Paul is an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto where he teaches media law. He served as a Bencher (Director) of the Law Society from 2007 to 2016. He been chair of the Law Foundation of Ontario, Pro Bono Law Ontario, and president of the Canadian Media Lawyers Association. Paul is currently a Director of the Canadian Journalism Foundation, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Osgoode Society. He writes and speaks frequently, in Canada and abroad, on media, constitutional and other legal issues.