Joshua Shaw PhD

• PGCHE (Kent)
• PhD (Osgoode)
• LLM (Dalhousie)
• JD (Manitoba)
• BSC (Hons) (Manitoba)

Dr. Joshua Shaw joined the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan in a tenure-track position in July 2025. He was previously appointed as a Lecturer in Law (equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, United Kingdom (2023-2025) and Schulich Fellow (Assistant Professor-Limited Term) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia (2022-2023). 

As a legal scholar, Joshua studies the relationships of law, culture and the human body, reflecting on what these relationships evidence about the nature of law and power, and how law matters to concepts and practices of medicine and health. His scholarship involves methods from the humanities, especially historical case-studies. He lately focusses on the legal classification of the human body and bodily materials (including claims of ownership), and norms around their use (especially exceptional uses of the dead and bodily materials). His critical and theoretical study of law and medicine, and law and the dead, have relevance to legal decision-making and public policy, including the application of private law to biomaterials, and the regulation of anatomy and dissection, organ and tissue donation and transplantation, and biotechnologies. 

Joshua is a lawyer in Ontario, having received his call to the bar in 2017. Upon completing his articling clerkship at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC/O), he continued to work at the IPC/O within their health policy department on legislative and policy matters until 2019. He is currently non-practising.

Joshua is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). FHEA is a professional designation in higher education teaching, which he received from the British charity Advance HE after completing his Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE) at the University of Kent. He is also a member of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; Canadian Law and Society Association; and Canadian Association of Law Teachers. He is a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Law and Society Association, and currently serves as its Vice President (Membership).

2025-2026
LAW 211.5 Tort law
LAW 394.3 Jurisprudence

Peer-reviewed articles (14)

Shaw, Joshua. 2025. A Common Law Power to Dissect: A Medico-Legal History. Medical Law Review 33(1): https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwaf006.

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2024. Confronting Jurisdiction with Antinomian Bodies. Law, Culture and the Humanities 20(1): 94-119, https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872120942770.



King, Tyler J., Joshua D.M. Shaw and Liam Kennedy. 2024. Documenting the Document: The Forensic Hospital Report and Its Knowledge Moves. Social and Legal Studies 33(3): 309-327, https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231187093.

Kennedy, Liam, Joshua D.M. Shaw and Tyler J. King. 2023. Disciplinary Paternalism and Resistance in Ontario’s Forensic Mental Health System. Critical Criminology 31: 843-858, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-023-09714-8.

Shaw, Joshua D.M., Tyler J. King and Liam Kennedy. 2023. Constructing Risk through Jurisdictional Talk: The Ontario Review Board Process under Part XX.1 of the Criminal Code. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 38(2): 180-200, https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2023.17.

Shaw, Joshua D.M. and Roxanne Mykitiuk. 2023. Jurisgenerative Tissues: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Legal Secretions of 3D-bioprinting. Law and Critique 34(1): 105-125, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-022-09319-0.

Shaw, Joshua D.M. and Daniel Konikoff. 2022. When Prisoners’ ‘Right to Die’ Goes Online: A Case-study of Legal and Penal Sensibilities. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 37(3): 451-471, https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2022.8.

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2021. The Spatio-Legal Production of Bodies Through the Legal Fiction of Death. Law and Critique 32(1): 69-90, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-020-09269-5.

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2020. Transcarceral Lawscapes Enacted in Moments of Aboriginalisation: A Case-Study of an Indigenous Woman Released on Urban Parole. International Journal of Law in Context 16(4): 422-442, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552320000427.

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2018. Contagion and the Public Body: A Re-Ordering of Private and Public Spheres in R v Gowdy. Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues 39(1): 127-165.

Shaw, Joshua. 2015. De-Recognition of Disability: Canadian Parens Patriae Jurisdiction and Sterilization of Children. Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues 36(1): 147-174.

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2015. The Queer Child Deserves Protection: Bill 18 and the Justifiable Infringement of Denominational Schools’ Freedom of Religion. Manitoba Law Journal 38(1): 331-357.

Alards-Tomalin, Douglas, Alexander Walker, Joshua D.M. Shaw and Launa C. Leboe-McGowan. 2015. Is 9 louder than 1? Cross-modal congruency effects between number magnitude and sound loudness Acta Psychologica 160(1): 95-103.

Alards-Tomalin, Douglas, Jason P. Leboe-McGowan, Joshua D.M. Shaw and Launa C. Leboe-McGowan. 2014. The effects of numerical magnitude, size, and color saturation on perceived interval duration. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40(2): 555-566. 

Peer-reviewed book sections (1)

Shaw, Joshua D.M. 2024. A Minor Jurisprudence of Play: Becoming Jurisprudents Through Play in the Majora’s Mask. In Dale Mitchell, Ashley Pearson and Timothy Peters, eds, Law, Video Games, Virtual Worlds: Playing Law. Routledge.

Peer-edited book sections (3)

Shaw, Joshua D.M. Forthcoming (Anticipated 2025). Chapter 23: Public Health Law through the Life Course: A Case-study on Steroids. In Jacob Shelley, Ubaka Ogbogu and Tess Sheldon, eds, Public Health Law and Policy (5th edition). LexisNexis.

Shaw, Joshua D.M. 2025. Humic Lawscapes. In Imogen Jones and Marc Trabsky, eds, Routledge Handbook of Law and Death. Routledge.

Mykitiuk, Roxanne and Joshua D.M. Shaw. 2023. Law and Gender. In Jan M Smits, Jaakko Husa, Catherine Valcke and Madalena Barreto Torres de Mendonca Narciso, eds, Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. Edward Elgar.

Dissertations (2)

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2024. The Heteronomy of Flesh: A Minor Jurisprudence of the Use of the Human Dead and Tissues. PhD Dissertation, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.

• Supervised by Roxanne Mykitiuk (principal), Ruth Buchanan and Dayna Nadine Scott; Examined by Bruce Ryder (chair), Stewart Motha (external), Jean-Thomas Tremblay (internal), Ruth Buchanan (internal), and Roxanne Mykitiuk (supervisor)

Shaw, Joshua David Michael. 2016. Defining Death: Law, Language and Systems. LLM Thesis, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University.

• Supervised by Jocelyn Downie; Read by Richard Devlin and Sheila Wildeman