Law

Professor Austin's research and teaching interests include privacy law, property law, and legal theory. She is published in such journals as Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and Canadian Journal of Law and Society. She is co-editor (with Dennis Klimchuk) of Private Law and the Rule of Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), in which distinguished Canadian and international scholars take on the general understanding that the rule of law is essentially only a doctrine of public law and consider whether it speaks to the nature of law more generally and thus also engages private law.

Professor Austin's privacy work has been cited numerous times by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada. She is also active in a number of public policy debates in Canada. Most recently, she collaborated on a report for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada entitled Seeing Through the Cloud: National Jurisdiction and Location of Data, Servers, and Networks Still Matter in a Digitally Interconnected World. Previous policy work includes consulting for the Canadian Judicial Council on their Model Policy for Access to Court Records in Canada. 

Professor Austin is currently a member of the International Advisory Panel for the American Law Institute's project, Restatement of the Law (Fourth), Property. 

In Memoriam: Arthur Cockfield, HBA (University of Western Ontario), LL.B (Queen’s University), JSM and JSD (Stanford University). Art was an Associate Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where he was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar. Prior to joining Queen’s, he worked as a lawyer in Toronto and as a law professor in San Diego. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas and a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Professor Cockfield authored, co-authored or edited nine books and over forty academic articles and book chapters that focus on tax law as well as law and technology theory and privacy law. He was the recipient of a number of fellowships and external research grants for this research, including four grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, an American Tax Policy Institute grant, the Charles D. Gonthier research fellowship for privacy law research, and two publication grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His writings have been translated into over twenty languages (mainly through his work as an author and editor for UNESCO) and have been published in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia.

Professor Cockfield passed away suddenly on 9 January 2022.

David Lyon is the Principal Investigator of the Big Data Surveillance Project (2015-2021). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Socioiogy and Law at Queen's University and is the former director of the Surveillance Studies Centre. Educated at the University of Bradford in the UK, Lyon has been studying surveillance since the mid-1980s. Credited with spearheading the field of “Surveillance Studies”, he has produced a steady stream of books and articles that began with The Electronic Eye (1994) and continued with Surveillance Society (2001), Surveillance after September 11 (2003), Surveillance Studies (2007), Identifying Citizens (2009), Liquid Surveillance (with Zygmunt Bauman, 2013) and Surveillance after Snowden (2015). His most recent publication is The Culture of Surveillance (Polity, 2018) and he is currently working on Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford). He has also co-edited a number of other books, mostly the products of team projects on surveillance, with research funding totalling almost $8 million. He is on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Surveillance & Society and The Information Society. Most recently awarded the Outstanding Contribution Award by the Surveillance Studies Network (2018) and the SSHRC Impact: Insight Award (2015), Lyon has also received numerous awards for his work, from Canada, Switzerland, the USA and the UK.

As Principal Investigator of the Big Data Surveillance project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, David Lyon is co-leading (with Stéphane Leman-Langlois and David Murakami Wood) research Stream One: Security. This stream examines the scope and impact of big data-dependent ‘national security’ surveillance of communications in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. They are working on an edited publication called Security Intelligence and Surveillance in the Big Data Age: The Canadian Case (UBC Press, forthcoming).