Shelley A.M. Gavigan, BA (Saskatchewan), LLB (Saskatchewan), MA (Toronto), LLM (Osgoode Hall Law School), SJD (University of Toronto).
Shelley Gavigan is Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, having retired as Professor of Law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in January 2017. She is a retired member of the Law Society of Ontario and the Law Society of Saskatchewan. She was a member of the Osgoode faculty for thirty-one years and taught courses in criminal law, family law, poverty law and children and the law. She was appointed Osgoode’s Associate Dean twice and served four terms as Academic Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services. She began her legal career as a lawyer in community legal clinics in Saskatchewan and was the first Director of Complaints/ Compliance with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission. Her research and scholarship are significantly interdisciplinary, located primarily in legal history, socio-legal studies, feminist legal studies and social justice. Her research involving the court records of nineteenth century North West Territories continues, as does her work focussed on ‘historicizing criminalization’ of Canada’s indigenous peoples.
Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History Books
Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (Osgoode Society with U.B.C, Press, 2012), 304pp.
2013 CLIO Prize – The Prairies, Canadian Historical Association (given for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions by individuals or organizations to regional history)
Short-listed and Honourable Mention, 2013 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize of the Canadian Historical Association (awarded annually to the best scholarly book in Canadian history)
Short-listed and Honourable Mention Award, 2012 Canadian Law & Society Association, Annual Book Prize for “an outstanding contribution to the study of law and society”
Other Legal History Publications
“Something Old, Something New? Retheorizing Privatization and Patriarchal Relations from the Outskirts of Family Law” (2012) 13 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 271
“Historical Perspectives on Women, Welfare Law and the State: The Canadian Experience,” with Dorothy E. Chunn. In The Legal Tender of Gender: Welfare Law and the Regulation of Women’s Poverty. Shelley A.M. Gavigan & Dorothy E. Chunn, eds. London, Hart Publishing – Oñati International Series in Law & Society, 2010.
“The First Wave of Modern Clinical Education in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia” with Jeffrey Giddings, Roger Burridge, and Catherine Klein” in Clinical Legal Education in Global Context, Frank Bloch, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
“More Than Just Mens Rea: Indian Policy in Two Aboriginal Capital Cases from Regina, NWT.” In Margaret Beare, ed. Honouring Social Justice: Honouring Dianne Martin Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009
“From Mother’s Allowance to Mothers Need Not Apply”: Canadian Welfare Law Reform in the Age of Neo-Liberalism.” With Dorothy E. Chunn (2008) 45 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 733
“Prisoner Never Gave Me Anything for What He Done”: Aboriginal Voices in the Criminal Court in the North-West Territories, 1876-1903” (2007) 3 Social and Legal Review 71
“Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud, and the Moral Regulation of the ‘Never Deserving’ Poor.” With Dorothy E. Chunn. (2004) 13 Social & Legal Studies 219-243.
“The Criminal Sanction as It Relates to Human Reproduction: The Genesis of the Statutory Prohibition of Abortion.” In Belinda Bennett, ed., Abortion. The International Library of Medicine, Ethics and Law Series. Aldershot, Hants, England, 2004 (Solicited by publisher for republication).
“Twenty-five Years of Dynamic Tension: The Parkdale Community Legal Services Experience” (1997) 35 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 443
“Petit Treason in Eighteenth-Century England: Women’s Inequality Before the Law,” (1989) 3 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 335
“Women’s Crime: Old Theories and New Perspectives,” in Too Few To Count: Women
Offenders in Canada, Ellen Adelberg & Claudia Currie, eds. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1987
“Women and Abortion in Canada: What’s Law Got to Do With It?” in Feminism and Political Economy: Women’s Work, Women’s Struggles, Heather Jon Maroney & Meg Luxton, eds. Toronto: Methuen, 1987
“On ‘bringing on the menses’: The Criminal Liability of Women and the Therapeutic Exception in Canadian Abortion Law” (1986) 1 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 279
“The Criminal Sanction as it Relates to Human Reproduction: The Genesis of the Statutory Prohibition of Abortion” (1984) 5 Journal of Legal History 20
