Queen’s Law scholars achieved outstanding success in this year’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada funding competitions. Four faculty members received Insight Grants, which enable scholars to address complex issues about individuals and societies and to further collective understanding. Another professor received an Insight Development Grant to advance a new research question and experiment with a novel method. The Faculty’s success rate was significantly above the national average, and its researchers’ projects ranked near the top of those funded. These prestigious awards advance faculty members’ investigations and provide important opportunities for students to work as research assistants. The five projects are:

Outsourced AI services: Dahan examines governance, regulation, and transparency

Professor Samuel Dahan is one of three scholars working on a project titled “The Future of Artificial Intelligence as a Service: Implications for Corporate Governance and AI Regulation.” While AI regulation is a major topic, less attention is given to how AI is outsourced to businesses. This can lead to transparency issues, unfair terms, and misuse of internal data by AI providers. For example, platforms like ChatGPT and Zoom use user-generated content to train AI models without compensation. The project explores the impact of outsourced AI on corporate governance and how these issues should be addressed in Canada’s AI regulation.

Reframing Arbitration: Karton takes contractarian approach to both private and public justice

Associate Dean Joshua Karton’s project, “Contracts All the Way Down: A Contractarian Theory of Commercial Arbitration,” proposes a new perspective on arbitration. The conventional view sees arbitrators as private judges, exercising authority delegated by the courts. Karton argues that this is backward: arbitration law is not the privatization of public civil justice but the public enforcement of private justice, similar to enforcing any other contract. This insight has implications for arbitrators’ authority, court supervision of arbitrations, policing bad faith tactics in arbitration, and the very nature of arbitration law.

Transitional justice: Vasanthakumar explores structural oppression in liberal democracies

Professor Ashwini Vasanthakumar’s project, “Transitional Justice for Everyday Oppression,” explores how transitional justice can address structural oppression in liberal democracies, which are grappling with colonial, racial, gender, and class injustices. She examines how a transitional justice lens expands our understanding of structural oppression and offers tools to redress and resist oppression. Through case studies on prisons and border control, her research engages with ongoing debates on abolition and reform, investigating how transitional justice can address the wrongs inflicted by these regimes of control and containment.

Webber examines shared human vulnerability in government policy justifications

Governments regularly justify policy measures by referencing the needs of vulnerable populations. Professor Grégoire Webber’s project, “Exploring Our Shared Human Vulnerability: On the Responsibility of Government and Law’s Foundations,” posits that vulnerability is not limited to certain groups but is a shared human experience. It seeks to demonstrate that government policies, such as those supporting asylum-seekers, low-income families, and Indigenous health, fulfil a universal responsibility to all. The research expands the understanding of vulnerability, suggesting that law’s commitment to freedom and agency must recognize our collective reliance on one another, thereby providing stronger justification for many policies as serving all persons equally.

Metcalf leads study on private enforcement rights in Canada, U.S.

Associate Dean Cherie Metcalf is leading a new research project, “Culture and Private Enforcement Rights for Public Law,” with U.S. collaborators from Emory, USC, and Stanford. The project has two comparative aspects. One uses computational linguistics and machine learning to identify private rights of action in Canadian regulatory regimes, comparing them with U.S. state law. The second examines how private rights of action influence public support for regulation, comparing Canadian and U.S. litigation cultures to explore whether private rights align with political or other cultural factors.