Malcolm Thorburn is Professor of Law and Chair in Law and Innovation at the Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Trudeau Foundation (2024-2027). He was the Nathaniel Fensterstock Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, New York, USA in 2025 and the Robert S. Campbell visiting professor at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, UK in 2011-2012. He has also held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg, Germany (2024), Sciences Po, Paris, France (2019), Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany (2011), the French National Centre for Criminology (CESDIP) in Paris, France (2011), and at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (2008). Until 2013, he held the Canada Research Chair in Crime, Security, and Constitutionalism at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. He clerked for Justice Louis Lebel of the Supreme Court of Canada (2000-2001).
His writing focuses on theoretical issues in criminal justice and public law including criminal law and procedure, sentencing, policing, and constitutional questions of rights and proportionality reasoning. He has published in many leading journals including the Yale Law Journal, the University of Toronto Law Journal, Ratio Juris, Criminal Law and Philosophy, and elsewhere. His work is included in anthologies such as the Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law (Oxford U Press), Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law (Oxford U Press), the Palgrave Companion to Criminal Responsibility (Palgrave), and elsewhere. He is the editor of two books: The Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law (with David Dyzenhaus) and The Dignity of Law (with Dwight Newman). He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Law and Philosophy and Criminal Law and Philosophy.
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