Michael Pal
Profile
Biography
Dr. Michael Pal is a Faculty member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and an Associate Professor within the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Michael Pal primarily researches the law of democracy, comparative constitutional law, and election law, and the intersection of technology and democracy. He has numerous publications relating to law, political science, and public policy, and is a frequent commentator in the media, including The Globe and Mail, CBC's The National and CTV National News.
Dr. Pal’s publications on the evolving relationship between democracy and technology address election cyber-security, voter privacy, and the impact of social media on elections. He is co-editor of the first book in Canada on election cyber-security, Cyber Threats to Canadian Democracy, forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press. With Elizabeth Judge, he authored “Voter Privacy in Big-Data Elections” (Osgoode Hall LJ, 2021). He published “Social Media and Democracy: Challenges for Election Law and Administration in Canada” (Election Law Journal, 2020), on how election law addresses the presence of social media in elections.
Dr. Pal has advised all levels of government in Canada on matters relating to election law and constitutional law. In 2017 he served as a Commissioner with the Far North Electoral Boundaries Commission for the Province of Ontario. He was also the external legal and policy advisor to the Ministry of the Attorney General in Ontario's 2017 campaign finance reforms. He appears frequently before Parliamentary committees and advises election commissions around the world.
Dr. Pal is on the Advisory Boards of the Indian Law Review, Electoral Integrity Project, and a member of the International Advisory Panel on Referendums at Australian National University. He is a past member of the Board of Directors of the South Asian Legal Aid Clinic of Ontario. He previously clerked at the Court of Appeal for Ontario for Justices Moldaver, Blair, Goudge, and Feldman, and worked in a national law firm in Toronto. He was formerly a Fellow at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy and Governance.
Dr. Pal obtained a J.D. and S.J.D. from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, where he was a Pierre-Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar, and an LL.M. in Legal Theory from New York University.
He supervises doctoral students in democracy and new technologies, constitutional law and theory, and election law