Dr. Tenille E. Brown
Dr. Brown holds a PhD in philosophy (law) from the University of Ottawa. Her thesis, titled, “The Geographies of Property Law: Engagement with Place and Space,” takes up the topic of property law and the many ways that property is created, changed and redistributed through the law of expropriation. The case study for her thesis is Kingsburg Beach, Nova Scotia, the location of a historical expropriation law decision, Mariner Real Estate Ltd. v Nova Scotia, 1999.
Dr. Brown also holds an LL.M. from the University of Ottawa in Aboriginal law and the then-draft International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and an LL.B. (Scots law) (Honours) from the University of Dundee, Scotland, where she graduated high school before immigrating to Canada. In Canada, Dr. Brown completed the “National Committee of Accreditation” certificate in order to practice law in Canada and she is now admitted to practice law as a solicitor and barrister at the bar of Ontario.
Prior to joining Bora Laskin Faculty of Law, Dr. Brown was an adjunct professor in the Common Law and Civil Law Sections of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, where she taught Property Law in the first year JD programme. She also created and taught two courses, Legal Theory and Social Sciences taught in the Civil law section as part of the undergraduate certificate in law offered by the Civil law section, and Law and Geography an elective offering in the JD programme Common law section. This was the first legal geography course in a law school in Canada.
Dr. Brown is a member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre housed at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Brown holds professional membership at the Bar of Ontario. She was a Student at Law at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, Canada’s leading public interest technology law clinic, where she contributed to interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada in the area of privacy law. She has practised in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, administrative and employment law. Before moving into academia, Dr. Brown worked in the Kingdom of Eswatini (at that time known as the Kingdom of Swaziland), Southern Africa, as a legal officer in a feminist organization.
Dr. Brown is a property law scholar who investigates the intersection of property, geography, and place, using spatial theory to investigate property as a place-making tool. Dr. Brown creates and employs a “law and geography” methodology, combining legal analysis with social science methods of data analysis, mapping, and field research to contextualize law. She writes in the areas of real property and land law, and technology and data.
While completing her doctorate at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Brown contributed to research projects on topics such as access to land and Indigenous peoples, mapping and digital technologies, data governance and on the regulation of emerging technologies. She was a student member on the Social Science and Humanities Research Council funded project titled “Geothink: Canadian Geospatial and Open Data Research Partnership,” where she contributed to research on liability in data use, open data and data propertization. As well she researched on the intersection between mapping, evidence and Constitutional s.35 Indigenous land rights for the mapping database “dreamcatcher” created by Co-Map, the Centre for Community Mapping, Waterloo, in partnership with the Mississauga’s of New Credit First Nation.
Dr. Brown is the co-editor of the leading Canadian property law case-book, A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions, and Commentary, 5th ed (Toronto, ON: Thomson Reuters, 2022) (co-editors, Douglas C. Harris, Jeremy de Beer, and Patricia L. Farnese) (6th ed forthcoming 2026).