Law professors advance inclusive access to knowledge
August 29, 2025
Image - Top row LTR: Professors Alfonso Nocilla, Nadia Lambek and Manish Oza. Bottom row LTR: Andy Yu, Jacob Shelley and Valerie Oosterveld.
Six Western Law professors are helping to advance inclusive access to knowledge through the creation of open educational resources.
Open educational resources are learning, teaching and research materials – like casebooks and textbooks – that are openly licenced and free to use. These educational resources help to reduce financial burden for students by offering an accessible alternative to commercial course materials.
Thanks to the support of Western Libraries’ Open Educational Resources Grant and Support Program - led by librarians Stephen Spong and Emily Carlisle, and supported by the Niblett Fund - Professors Alfonso Nocilla, Nadia Lambek, Manish Oza, Andy Yu and Jacob Shelley have each created new open access textbooks and casebooks. Professor Valerie Oosterveld and law PhD student Loyce Mrewa also recently contributed to a ground-breaking open access book, Feminist Judgments: Reimagining the International Criminal Court.
Professor Alfonso Nocilla is co-editor of this first open access text on Canadian bankruptcy and insolvency law. Each chapter includes detailed analyses of the relevant statutory rules and leading cases, along with excerpts from scholarly articles and problem questions that invite readers to consider the principles and policy objectives underlying the Canadian bankruptcy regime. The full text is available on CanLII and an instructor’s manual is also available upon request. It is currently the primary instructional text used in several law schools across Canada, including Western.
Open Access Property Law Casebook - Professors Nadia Lambek, Manish Oza and Andy Yu
Professors Nadia Lambek, Manish Oza and Andy Yu are creating an open access property law casebook to replace commercial casebooks and their own teaching materials. The casebook will be suitable for use in 1L property courses in Canadian law schools, as well as providing access to information on property law for the general public. At present, there is no open access property casebook in Canada and a limited selection of property casebooks more broadly.
This will be the first such casebook, containing excerpts of cases, academic articles and other relevant materials covering a broad range of topics in both personal and real property law. It will incorporate Indigenous perspectives throughout — not only in the sections on Aboriginal title — as well as critical and other theoretical approaches to property law. The casebook will also deal with new developments in property law, particularly those stemming from new technologies.
Salus Populi: The Health of the People - Professor Jacob Shelley
Professor Jacob Shelley created an open educational resource to replace a commercial textbook used in the Public Health Law & Policy in Canada course. He created content to be used to teach students about public health law that can be tailored to specific disciplines and level of training.
Complimentary materials were developed with a public audience in mind. The content crosses mediums. Traditional written materials were developed, utilizing a range of approaches (articles, case studies, etc.), but attention was also given to developing alternative modes of delivery, specifically podcasts and videos.
In the past decade, feminist scholars and women's rights activists have used the feminist judgment method to reimagine the relationship between law and gender justice, resulting in rewritten 'feminist' judgments from courts around the world. This book extends this approach and applies it to a wide range of decisions of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Hague-based court with power to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression in over 120 countries.
Professor Valerie Oosterveld and law PhD student Loyce Mrewa have contributed to sub-chapter 11 that provides a critical reflection on the feminist reimagining of five selected decisions from the two ICC situations in the Central African Republic (CAR), known as ‘CAR I’ and ‘CAR II’. It begins by providing background to the relevant conflicts, as well as the procedural history of the cases prosecuted at the ICC. It goes on to summarise the key facts and outcomes of the ICC proceedings, before discussing how the authors of the reimagined decisions have departed from the original in adopting a feminist perspective. The sub-chapter considers what makes each decision ‘feminist’ and reflects upon how gender justice might be effected if we were to act beyond the ‘existing rules’ of international criminal law.
