Hassan Ahmad sees society’s increasing complexity reflected in administrative law

Hassan Ahmad can think of few better indicators of society’s increasing complexity than the growth of the administrative state.

“1825 looked very different to 2025 and administrative law is a response to that diversity and fragmentation in decision making,” says Ahmad, who teaches courses to students enrolled in Osgoode’s Professional LLM in Administrative Law.

The trend is particularly evident in common law jurisdictions such as Canada, where specialized tribunals and administrative boards have been created to decide matters related to, for instance, intellectual property, national security, human rights, labour and employment, immigration, and energy, among many others.

“It’s really taken off exponentially in the last 100 years or so,” Ahmad adds. “We live in a complex, multifaceted society where we need people with specific experience and expertise; that’s why we have so many different types of administrative decisionmakers.” 

Ahmad’s appointment as a full-time member of the Osgoode faculty in July 2024 was a homecoming of sorts, arriving as it did 15 years after his original enrollment as a JD student at the law school.

Having grown up in a family with no legal connections at all, Ahmad admits that when he made that first trip to Osgoode, he still had “no clear idea” about what exactly a career in the law entailed. Still, Ahmad’s subsequent success and the more recent experience of his younger-generation relatives suggest there may have been some untapped legal potential in their shared ancestry.

At Osgoode, Ahmad followed his instincts and found himself drawn to classes that gave him a chance to develop his advocacy skills.

“I still encourage my students to think about their guiding light and what pushes them,” he explains. “For some, it’s the collaborative sort of legal work, where you’re wheeling and dealing to come to an agreement. But for me, it was the adversarial, win-lose nature of litigation.”

After securing a summer student position at the Vancouver office of a large national firm, Ahmad managed to secure a transfer to its Toronto headquarters to complete his articling term.

“I loved it out there, but all of my family was in Toronto,” he says.

While building his commercial litigation practice, Ahmad then decided to pursue a Master’s of Law degree at The University of California at Berkeley, where he also spent time working at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Following his graduation, he broadened his experience even further, working as a judicial intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.

After his return to Toronto, Ahmad juggled PhD studies with a private practice in civil and class actions litigation, before landing a position at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law – with a teaching load that included his first administrative law class.

Ahmad also taught the subject at the University of British Columbia’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, before repeating his earlier cross-country move to take up his current position at Osgoode.

Over the years, Ahmad has developed an approach that frames Canadian administrative law as the product of a power struggle between the three branches of government: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

“We look at how the separation of powers has evolved and changed over time. It hasn’t always been smooth; there has been plenty of push-and-pull that continues until today,” he says.

The tension plays out frequently in the country’s courts, including at the Supreme Court of Canada. Ahmad helps students stay on top of developments in his course Administrative Law: Overview and Current Developments and warns students to be prepared for a heavy reading list.

“Administrative law is very fluid and variable compared with other areas of the law, which catches a lot of students off guard,” Ahmad says. “There are a lot of cases you need to go through to understand the law, whether you’re in class or going out into practice using the principles you learn.”  

Still, he says Administrative Law LLM enrollees – who include lawyers in private practice, in-house counsel, government lawyers from the provincial and federal levels, as well as senior leaders at many of the tribunals and boards that are the subject of his courses – typically rise to the challenge.

“They tend to have considerable work and life experience,” Ahmad adds. “They’re a very engaged group and you get the sense that they really want to be here and learn.”