Benjamin Berger is Associate Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School and a member of the Graduate Faculty in the Socio-Legal Studies Program at York University. He was previously at the University of Victoria, where he was an associate professor in the Faculty of Law and held a cross appointment in the Department of Philosophy. Prior to that he served as law clerk to the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University and won the gold medal in law at the University of Victoria.
His areas of interest include law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, the law of evidence, and legal history. Professor Berger is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and is an editor of the Hart Publishing Series Constitutional Systems of the World. He has published broadly in his principal areas of research and his work has appeared in multiple edited collections and legal and interdisciplinary journals. He received the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teacher’s Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination.” He has also been recognized for his excellence in teaching. While at the University of Victoria, he twice received the Terry J. Wuester Award and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award; in 2013 he received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award. He can be reached at bberger@osgoode.yorku.ca.
Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Books
The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: The Osgoode Society and University of British Columbia Press, 2008) 400 pp. (editor with Hamar Foster and Andrew Buck).
Other Legal History Publications
“The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination” University of Toronto Law Journal, vol 61, 2011, pp. 579-616.
‘Judges, Juries, and the History of Criminal Appeals’ Law and History Review, Vol 29, 2011, pp. 297-302.
‘Law’s Religion : Rendering Culture’ in Richard Moon, ed., Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), pp. 264-299.
‘Criminal Appeals as Jury Control: An Anglo-Canadian Historical Perspective on the Rise of Criminal Appeals’ Canadian Criminal Law Review, Vol 10, 2005, pp. 1-41.
‘Choice Among Values: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives on the Defence of Necessity’ Alberta Law Review, Vol 39, 2002, pp. 848-863.
