Securities Litigation and Enforcement is an elective course in Osgoode’s Professional LLM in Securities Law that examines how securities law is enforced through litigation and regulatory action in Canadian capital markets. The course considers how investors, issuers, and regulators interact within a framework designed to promote market integrity, deter misconduct, and provide avenues for redress.
The course is taught by Karen Manarin, Special Advisor on Financial Crime and the Toronto Integrated Market Enforcement Team (IMET) at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Manarin brings extensive experience across securities enforcement and professional regulation, including a senior leadership role at the Ontario Securities Commission, as well as earlier experience prosecuting complex frauds and arguing appeals before the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Securities enforcement, Manarin explains, sits at the centre of how modern capital markets function. “Securities is a barometer of the economy,” she notes. Because of that central role, she emphasizes that enforcement is constantly responding to changes in markets, behaviour, and technology. “There’s always a technological aspect that we talk about,” she says. “Technology is at the forefront. It has infiltrated every issue.”
A key part of the course is understanding how enforcement actually operates across different legal pathways. Manarin explains that students examine administrative, quasi-criminal, and criminal regimes in depth, along with the legislation and key cases that structure them. The course also situates Canadian enforcement within a broader comparative lens, looking to the United States and the United Kingdom to reflect how interconnected capital markets have become.
The classroom brings together both legal and non-legal professionals working in areas such as finance, compliance, regulation, and policy. Manarin highlights the value of this mix. “It really enriches the class,” she explains, “because you have people not only who focus on law, but have focused on different aspects of the markets.” These students bring what she describes as a grounded understanding of how decisions are made inside organizations, including how risk is assessed and how compliance actually functions in practice.
For students without formal legal training, the course is structured to be accessible while still rigorous. Manarin makes herself available to help students “understand how to read case law,” and both she and guest speakers ensure legal materials are explained in context. The focus is on helping students understand not just what a case says, but “what the decision is, why the decision is important, and what areas to focus on.”
Learning in the course is highly applied and discussion-based. Manarin structures each topic by first providing an overview to situate it within the broader enforcement landscape, before bringing in guest speakers with direct experience in securities litigation and enforcement. This allows students to connect doctrine to practice and understand how enforcement decisions are made in real institutional settings.
The course also engages directly with contemporary issues shaping securities regulation, including whistleblower programs, continuous disclosure obligations, governance reforms, and the increasing role of technology in markets. These issues are used to illustrate how enforcement evolves in response to new forms of risk and complexity.
Assessment reflects both participation and applied legal reasoning. Students receive part of their grade for participation, and part through two short case summaries based on course readings and case law. These summaries require students to synthesize materials in advance of class and identify key legal and conceptual issues. The remaining assessment is a final evaluation, where students may choose between a take-home exam or a research paper, with the paper option also satisfying the LLM research requirement.
By the end of the course, students develop the ability to critically assess securities enforcement from multiple perspectives and to understand how different enforcement regimes operate in practice. Manarin underscores that the goal is for students to leave with “an understanding of all sides of an argument related to the litigation and enforcement of securities law,” and the ability to analyze how enforcement decisions shape – and are shaped by – the broader market system. “They can assess which factors matter most and whether intervention makes sense, and if so, what kind.”
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