Dr. Michael Pal is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Common Law, where he has worked since 2014. He is an internationally renowned scholar of constitutional law and election law with over 35 publications and multiple books.
In 2025, he was a Visitor at the Bonavero Human Rights Institute at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. In 2024 he was Visiting Professor at the Università Degli Studi di Brescia in their international project on “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Democratic Representation”.
He has a J.D. and doctorate in law from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he was a P.E. Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and an LL.M in Legal Theory from the NYU School of Law.
His work has been influential in law reform at all levels of government in Canada, including on voting rights, campaign finance law, electoral disinformation, foreign interference in elections, and regulation of AI. His work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, including by the majority and dissenting opinions in the leading judgment on constitutional principles, City of Toronto, and by constitutional courts around the world.
His co-edited book, Cyber Threats to Canadian Democracy (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), was named one of the Hill Times’ books of the year.
He is an internationally recognized academic leader. He serves on the Advisory Boards of the Indian Law Review and the Electoral Integrity Project, and is the founding co-President of the International Society for Public Law (ICON-S) Canada Chapter.
At the Faculty of Law, Dr. Pal received the Faculty’s 2018 award for teaching excellence. He was academic Director of the Public Law Group at the Faculty for several years and was instrumental in the creation of the Public Law Centre at the Faculty. He is the lead principal investigator of a Trans-Atlantic Partnership Grant on Democracy, Governance, and Trust funded by SSHRC, the Swiss National Science Federation, and the U.K. granting agencies.
He appears regularly before Parliamentary Committees and was an expert witness before the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions (the Hogue Inquiry). He is a frequent commentator in the media on electoral law and constitutional law, including in The Globe and Mail, New York Times, CBC's The National and Power and Politics, and CTV National News.
He is a past member of the Board of Directors of the South Asian Legal Aid Clinic of Ontario. He previously clerked at the Court of Appeal for Ontario for Justices Moldaver, Blair, Goudge, and Feldman, and worked in a national law firm in Toronto. He was formerly a Fellow at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy and Governance.