Osgoode Hall Law School Professors Benjamin Berger and Poonam Puri are the recipients of prestigious awards recognizing excellence in teaching and research.
Berger has been awarded the Canadian Association of Law Teachers -Association Canadienne des Professeurs de Droit (CALT-ACPD) Prize for Academic Excellence for 2014-15. The annual CALT Prize for Academic Excellence honours exceptional contribution to research and law teaching by a Canadian law teacher in mid-career. The award will be given out at a reception at the CALT Conference on June 2 at the University of Ottawa.
The Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP) has awarded the 9th Annual Lloyd Houlden Fellowship to Puri. The $20,000 fellowship, named after the late Justice Lloyd Houlden of the Ontario Court of Appeal, is awarded annually to support “an original analysis of innovative ways to improve the insolvency system, a historical analysis of particular features of the system or an exploration of any other insolvency-related idea.” Puri’s research paper will consider the issue of imposing personal liability on the directors and officers of insolvent corporations for environmental remediation costs in light of the Ontario Ministry of the Environment’s recent 2013 decision in the Northstar Aerospace insolvency.
Berger’s areas of teaching and research specialization are criminal and constitutional law and theory, law and religion, and the law of evidence. In addition to his work at Osgoode, he holds an appointment as an Associate Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of York’s Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies. Berger received the 2010 CALT Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination.” He also twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law where he began teaching in 2004. He received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.
Puri is a respected scholar and commentator on issues of corporate governance, corporate law, securities law and financial regulation. She was the recipient of Osgoode’s Teaching Award in 1999 and 2009. Puri served as Associate Dean, Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations from July 2011 to September 2013 then took on the role of Associate Dean until July 2014. She was also Co-Director of the Hennick Centre for Business and Law, a joint initiative of Osgoode and the Schulich School of Business at York, from July 2008 to June 2013. Former Head of Research and Policy at the Capital Markets Institute, Rotman School of Business, University of Toronto, she is Director of the Business Law LLM at Osgoode Professional Development.