Research Faculty Directory

Julen Etxabe is Canada Research Chair in Jurisprudence and Human Rights and joined Allard Law as Assistant Professor in July of 2019. His current research combines legal and literary theory to identify a new model of dialogical judgment emerging in the area of human rights, which is transforming inherited notions of reasoning, rights, authority, and law in the post-national and diverse societies of the 21st century.

Jon Festinger, K.C. has been a long-serving Adjunct Professor at the Allard School of Law (since 1992), now Lecturer. He teaches the following courses at Allard: Torts; Intellectual Property Law; A.I. and the Law; Copyright Law and Social Media; Video Game Law; Communications Law; Media & Entertainment Law; and Business Organizations. In March 2019 he received a Teaching Service Award from the Allard School of Law.

Professor Alexandra Flynn’s teaching and research focus on municipal law and governance, administrative law, and property law. She has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, public reports, and edited books on Indigenous municipal legal relationships, housing and homelessness, and the constitutional status of cities.

Dr. Cristie Ford is a leading scholar, nationally and internationally, in the fields of regulation and governance, securities and financial regulation, and administrative law.

Toby Goldbach joined Peter A. Allard School of Law in 2017 following a two-year teaching fellowship at Cornell University Law School. Dr. Goldbach was a UBC Green College Leading Scholar (2018-2020) and is co-chair of the Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network on Innovations in Judging. 

Dr Benjamin Goold is a Professor at the Allard School of Law. 

His major research interests include privacy rights, the use of surveillance technologies by the police and intelligence communities, and the governance of international borders. He is the author of numerous works on privacy, surveillance, and security, including CCTV and Policing (Oxford University Press) and Security and Human Rights (Hart Publishing; edited with Prof Liora Lazarus).

Sara Gordon is an Associate Professor at the Allard School of Law. Her work examines how legal decision-making is shaped—not just by laws and evidence—but by the assumptions, conventional wisdom, and cognitive biases of the people making those decisions. Professor Gordon is particularly interested in how judges and lawyers often rely on outdated or unsupported ideas about mental health and human behavior, even as medical and psychological research continues to evolve.

Isabel Grant is a Professor at the Allard School of Law specializing in criminal law. She has published extensively on violence against women including on sexual assault, criminal harassment and homicide. She is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project on the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on sexual assault law with Professor Janine Benedet. She teaches in the areas of criminal law, homicide, sentencing and mental health law.