Visiting Scholar: Goldbach, Toby

Toby Susan Goldbach is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. She holds a JSD from Cornell Law School in legal anthropology and dispute resolution. A socio-legal scholar, she studies judicial behaviour, court reform and dispute resolution, and how institutional practices shape legal processes. Her research draws on interviews, archival work, participant observation, and multi-sited fieldwork. She has written on class action fairness hearings and sentencing circles, and is a co-investigator on a European Research Council study of British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal. Her work has appeared in Law & Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, the University of Miami Law Review and the Cornell International Law Journal. Her book, The Institutional Judge: Uncovering the Politics and Practices Behind Court Reform (NYU Press, in production), draws on interviews with more than fifty judges, court staff and lawyers. Before entering academia, she was a law clerk at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and a mediator. She currently co-chairs the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network 43, “Innovations in Judging.”
Area(s) of expertise: Dispute Resolution, Legal Procedure, Judicial Politics, Law & Society, Comparative Law