Arthur Cockfield, HBA (Western University Ivey School of Business), LL.B (Queen’s University), JSM and JSD (Stanford University), is a Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where he was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar. Prior to joining Queen’s, he worked as a lawyer at Goodmans LLP in Toronto. He is a senior research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and, for the Winter/Spring 2013 semester, was a Fulbright Visiting Chair in Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Cockfield has authored, co-authored or edited books, academic articles and book chapters that focus on tax law as well as law and technology theory and privacy law. He has been awarded (along with Catherine Brown) the Douglas J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award by the Canadian Tax Foundation. He is also the recipient of a number of fellowships and external research grants for this research, including five grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, an American Tax Policy Institute grant, an Office of the Privacy Commission of Canada research grant, the Charles D. Gonthier research fellowship, and two publication grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His books include Globalization and Its Tax Discontents (University of Toronto Press, 2010)(as editor), and NAFTA Tax Law and Policy: Resolving the Clash between Economic and Sovereignty Interests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), which was short-listed for the Purvis Prize by the Canadian Economics Association.
His tax publications have appeared in journals that include Minnesota Law Review, Queen’s Law Journal, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Stanford Technology Law Review, University of British Columbia Law Review, Connecticut Law Review, Tulane Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Stanford Journal of International Law, Canadian Tax Journal, Virginia Tax Review, Columbia Tax Law Journal, Tax Notes International, Tax Notes, State Tax Notes, Bulletin for International Taxation, and the World Tax Journal.
Professor Cockfield has taught courses in Canadian law (taxation, international tax, contracts, business associations, legal ethics, cyberlaw and accounting for lawyers) and U.S. law (federal income tax, international tax, taxation of business entities, corporations, corporate finance, and cyberspace and e-commerce law). For most of these courses, he has developed a narrative law teaching method that takes a lawyer/protagonist through a series of problems. Three of these ‘novellas’ have been published: International Taxation Core Concepts (featuring tax novella ‘La Brienza Winery: Tax Trouble in Wine Country’)(Thomson Reuters, 2nd ed., 2017)(with David Kerzner); Student Edition of the Income Tax Act (featuring tax novella ‘How to Manage a Difficult Tax Partner’)(Thomson Reuters, 7th ed., 2017 edition)(with Martha O’Brien and Catherine Brown); and Introduction to Legal Ethics (featuring legal ethics novella ‘Sandra’s Trust’)(LexisNexis, 2nd ed., 2016). He has also authored a novel, The End (SSI Publishing, 2003), which is a techno-thriller that envisions the end of the world through a global warming apocalypse.
Professor Cockfield has served as a legal and policy consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Department of Justice, the Department of Finance, the Advisory Panel on Canada’s System of International Taxation, the National Judicial Institute, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. He has also testified before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance on multiple occasions. He is a member of the Law Society of Ontario.