Led under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Judge, a Full Professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa and a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, Dr. Tenille Brown‘s thesis explores geography and property, offering an innovative reframing of property law, with a focus on expropriation, as a tool for creating place. In her work she creates a law and geography methodology and then uses it to examine the spatiality of laws that create place in the location of Kingsburg Beach, Nova Scotia, the location for the legal decisionMariner Real Estate Ltd. v. Nova Scotia.
Dr. Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University where she teaches and researches in the areas of property law and technology law. Her work in technology law focuses on issues related to spatial data, augmented reality, and mapping. She is a former member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa, and a barrister and solicitor at the Bar of Ontario. She holds an LLM from the University of Ottawa in the field of Aboriginal law and an LLB (Scots law) from the University of Dundee, Scotland.
Prior to her academic work, Dr. Brown worked in the Kingdom of Eswatini (formerly the Kingdom of Swaziland) as a legal officer in a national feminist rights organisation. Dr. Brown is co-editor of the property law casebook, A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions & Commentary (co-editors, Douglas Harris, Jeremy De Beer, and Angela Cameron) (Toronto, Ontario: Carswell, 2026, forthcoming)).
In addition to her supervisor, the defense committee included Professor Jeremy De Beer, Faculty member at the Centre, along with Professors David Wiseman, Heather McLeod-Kilmurray and Jamie Baxter (Dalhousie). The chair of the thesis defence was Professor João Velloso.
Congratulations to Dr. Tenille Brown!