Toby Goldbach is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, having joined the faculty in 2017. She comes to the law school following a two-year teaching fellowship at Cornell Law School. She earned her doctorate from Cornell, where she was a Rudolf B. Schlesinger Research Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law at Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, and held grants from the Institute for Comparative Modernities and the Berger Center for Comparative & International Law.
Dr. Goldbach’s research sits at the intersection of legal procedure, international relations, and anthropology of law, focusing on the transnational movement of norms related to court procedure and dispute resolution. Her interest in anthropology of law has lead her to examine the practices of law reform and legal change, focusing on judges’ non-casework in procedural reform, courthouse design, as well as their intermingling of adversarial and non-adversarial (“alternative”) mechanisms for dispute resolution.
Dr. Goldbach’s research is informed by her work experiences, serving as law clerk to Commercial List judges and Senior Law Clerk to Chief Justice Patrick LeSage at the Superior Court of Justice (Ontario); and lawyer at the Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario) Civil Justice Policy and Reform branch. Her writing also relies on research conducted at the World Bank’s Law, Justice and Development Week; meetings of the International Organization for Judicial Training; the opening ceremonies for the Aboriginal Conference Settlement Suites and consolidated courthouse in Thunder Bay, Ontario; and offices of the Supreme Court of Israel. Her research has been published in the Indiana Journal for Global Legal Studies, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems and most recently her article on Israeli judges’ work in international judicial education was published in the Cornell International Law Journal.
Dr. Goldbach’s current research examines judicial education institutes and norms related to commercial courts and court-connected mediation in Ghana, and well as U.S. District Court judicial efforts to develop fairness hearing procedures for class action settlements in mass tort civil actions.