Professor Alfonso Nocilla Named 2025 Western Massey Fellow
July 11, 2025
Professor Alfonso Nocilla is one of two Western University faculty members selected as Western Massey Fellows for 2025, a program that allows Western professors to join the community at Massey College during a sabbatical year.
The Western Massey Fellowship program grants professors senior resident status at Massey College, a graduate community at the University of Toronto known for fostering interdisciplinary relationships among scholars. During their residency at Massey, fellows participate in the intellectual and social life of the college and mentor junior fellows while focusing on their own research.
For Nocilla, an Associate Professor and the Catalyst Capital Fellow in Insolvency Law at Western Law, the fellowship offers the opportunity to focus on his research on Canada’s cross-border insolvency regime.
“My big question is after about 15 years, how are we faring in Canada with respect to the implementation of the Model Law?” said Nocilla.
The Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency was developed by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) in 1997 and adopted by Canada in 2009. “It’s a sort of exemplar that countries can decide to follow by implementing it in their domestic legislation to help resolve corporate insolvencies that cross borders,” Nocilla explained. “It’s very much focused on cooperation and coordination among courts and proceedings in the different countries where these debtor companies have their assets and their operations.”
Considering today’s geopolitical tensions, financial headwinds, and new developments within UNCITRAL itself, Nocilla explains that this is an important period for cross-border insolvency reform.
“I would say that at the moment there is a lot going on in the international bankruptcy world,” he said. “There are geopolitical concerns right now that are bringing focus on some of these issues… There have been some, say, inside baseball developments, and then there are also the larger geopolitical issues at play that make it an interesting area right now.”
He made clear how important Canada’s role is in global trade: “We're a trading nation and we depend very much on the liberal international order as a country.”
The opportunity for Nocilla to conduct this research at Massey College was a natural fit. “It’s a great opportunity to connect with scholars in other fields, and I think increasingly the research in law is interdisciplinary,” said Nocilla. “Massey College is wonderful… a place for people to gather and share different ideas across different disciplines.”
He also looks forward to both the formal and informal learning that Massey fosters. “It’s a way to encourage spontaneous discovery,” he noted. “As I'm working on my own area of research, it’s a way to find connections.”
And beyond academic life, the environment at Massey provides the perfect setting for focused scholarship. “They create a very calm and welcoming environment for research,” said Nocilla. “It’s a little world where you can really get down to the work… It's a way to work uninterrupted, which is so hard to do.”
Through this fellowship, Nocilla will research how Canada’s cross-border insolvency framework is functioning, with the goal of identifying areas for legal reform.
