Patricia Irene McMahon

Professor Patricia McMahon’s areas of teaching and research are civil procedure, law and equity and legal history broadly defined. She is also the Director and Lead Interviewer of the Oral History Program at the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the Co-Academic Director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution. She joined the faculty in July 2022 after a number of years in private practice.

Professor McMahon holds a BA in history from Huron University College at Western University and an MA in history from the University of Toronto. She was awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for her work on how protest movements influenced Canada’s nuclear policy from 1957 to 1963, the subject of her PhD in Canadian diplomatic and political history from the University of Toronto. This was followed by an LLB (with honours) from the University of Toronto, where she served as co-editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review and received the Dean Cecil A. Wright Key. Following a clerkship with the Honorable Justice Ian Binnie at the Supreme Court of Canada, she attended Yale Law School as a Fulbright Fellow, where she completed an LLM and JSD. Her dissertation dealt with the influence of law reform movements on the procedural fusion of law and equity in Victorian England, which led to the Judicature Acts and modern conceptions of civil procedure. At Yale, she was also a student director in a clinic engaged in civil liberties litigation related to the policies of the U.S. government following the attacks of September 11, 2001. This included cases involving detentions, search and seizure, due process, international human rights and humanitarian law. From 2004 to 2008, she served as a regional representative for the executive committee of Yale Law School.