News

The Schulich School of Law is proud to announce the appointment of Associate Professor Olabisi D. Akinkugbe as the Purdy Crawford Chair in Business Law for a three-year term.  

The Purdy Crawford Chair, established in 2001, was created through the generous support of alumni and friends of the Schulich School of Law and is focused on supporting scholars in business law, including those with an interest in corporate law and theory, securities regulation, finance, bankruptcy and insolvency, taxation, competition law, trade, investment, and other related fields.  

Purdy Crawford (LLB ’55) hailed from Five Islands, N.S., and pursued his legal career with Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, practicing primarily in the corporate/commercial area. He also served as CEO of Imasco before rejoining Osler as counsel in March of 2000.

“It is an honour to have been appointed the sixth Purdy Crawford Chair in Business Law at the Schulich School of Law,” says Akinkugbe. “Building on the foundations of the previous holders in our comprehensive business law program, I hope to deepen the law school’s position as a leading academic institution for convening research conversations and the study of business law and policy in its national, regional, and international economic contexts.”

Akinkugbe has a PhD in law from the University of Ottawa, an LLM from the University of Toronto, and an LLB from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He has worked as legal counsel on the first public-private partnership road project in West Africa, practiced both corporate and commercial law at a law firm in Lagos, and served as an active member of the firm’s litigation and arbitration practice group.  

He joined the Schulich Law community in September 2017 after teaching law at the University of New Brunswick. He previously served as Schulich Law’s Viscount Bennett Professor of Law and was convenor of the annual Viscount Bennett Roundtable on International Economic Law. He currently teaches Contracts and Judicial Decision-Making, International Trade Law, and International Investment Law and was the recipient of the Hannah and Harold Barnett Excellence in Teaching Award for 2023-2024, given by the Law Students’ Society to a first-year law professor.

Akinkugbe co-founded Afronomicslaw.org, a free access academic community that focuses on all aspects of international economic law as they relate to Africa and the Global South. In the 2024-25 academic year, he is serving as the Allan Rock Visiting Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), University of Ottawa.

The Purdy Crawford Workshop

The Schulich School of Law will host the Purdy Crawford Workshop on International Business Law: Rethinking the Dimensions of International Economic Law on September 13-14, 2024. The two-day event will bring together nearly 50 leading scholars, graduate students, and practitioners from across Canada and beyond, for panels and roundtable discussions on cutting-edge issues in the field.

This year’s workshop is taking place in collaboration with the Dalhousie Health Justice Institute, the Marine & Environmental Law Institute, and afronomicslaw.org, and will feature insightful commentary from law school faculty including Akinkugbe, Opeyemi Bello, Matthew Herder, Morris Odeh, and Sara Seck.

“Over the course of the next three years, I hope to convene this workshop annually with a focus on national and international business law issues that will benefit Schulich Law students,” says Akinkugbe.