Jassmine Girgis

Biography

Professor Jassmine Girgis joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary in 2008.

Professor Girgis graduated in 2004 from Western Law as the Silver Medalist, then went on to serve as the Law Clerk to the Honourable Mr. Justice J. Edgar Sexton of the Federal Court of Appeal in 2005. She was awarded the Paul Martin Scholarship to undertake her graduate work at the University of Cambridge, where she graduated in 2006. She went on to join the Faculty of Law at Western University, where she remained until she joined the University of Calgary. 

Professor Girgis is a member of the Law Society of Alberta. Prior to that, she was a member of the Law Society of Ontario.

Research Activities

Professor Jassmine Girgis researches and writes in the areas of director and officer liability, bankruptcy and restructuring law, and contract law. Her research primarily focuses on corporate restructuring and director and officer liability, and where they intersect. She also writes extensively on corporate rescue and its intersection with law and economics and with the public interest. 

Professor Girgis has been retained as an expert witness and as a legal consultant on oppression remedy and contract law matters. She has been published in Canadian and international law journals and has presented her research to legal academics, judges, and lawyers, across Canada and internationally. 

Most recently, Professor Girgis has published on insolvency litigation funding, where she wrote on the state of insolvency litigation funding in Canada, a report that was part of a larger project covering nine jurisdictions, “A Cross-Jurisdictional Comparison of the Use of Commercial Litigation Funding in Insolvency”. The project was headed out of Australia and funded by INSOL International. She has also written about insolvent litigation funding and the protection of unsecured creditors. She has published several papers about the intersection of public policy and insolvency law, specifically dealing with environmental liabilities in bankruptcy and the misrepresentation and false pretences exception to the bankruptcy discharge. She is currently co-editing the upcoming edition of Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law in Canada, Cases, Materials, and Problems (Canada: Irwin Law) 2019, which will be published with CanLII through its open access platform. This is the only bankruptcy casebook in use in Canadian law schools, and the first and only fully open access casebook in the insolvency law field in Canada. The book has been funded by a Western University Open Educational Resources Grant. She also blogs extensively on Ablawg.ca.

She has received numerous fellowships and grants for her work on director and officer liability and bankruptcy and insolvency. These have included the Stikeman Elliott LLP’s Research Fellowship in Corporate Law and the Foundation for Legal Research Grant for her work on the oppression remedy and fraudulent conveyances, the Stikeman Elliott LLP Research Fellowship in Corporate Law for her research on how to make the legal test for the oppression remedy more workable, the Foundation for Legal Research Grant for her work on the "Assessment of ‘Going Concern Value’ in a Corporate Restructuring," the INSOL Scholar Fellowship from INSOL International, to represent Canada and the United States, which she used to undertake research on the status of employees as vulnerable creditors in bankruptcies, and the Second Annual Lloyd Houlden Research Fellowship from the Canadian Insolvency Foundation (CIF) to undertake research in the area of director and officer liability to creditors during insolvency.

Professor Girgis currently serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the Canadian Business Law Journal and the Annual Review of Insolvency Law. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA), Alberta Branch, and as the representative for Canada and the United States in Course Committee, INSOL International Certificate in International Insolvency Law. She has also served as an elected Outside Director to the Board of the Canadian Association of Insolvency and Restructuring Professionals (CAIRP), as the Academic Member of the editorial review board for the CAIRP publication, Rebuilding Success, and as a Director and Secretary on the Canadian Insolvency Foundation board of directors. She was also the Book Review Editor for the Canadian Business Law Journal for six years.