Dr. Cristie Ford

Dr. Cristie Ford’s research focuses on regulation and governance theory, securities and financial regulation, and administrative law. Recently she has expanded her work to include access to justice and governance of the legal profession.

Professor Ford has published extensively in leading academic journals and handbooks, and written two books: Innovation and the State: Finance, Regulation, and Justice (Cambridge University Press: 2017); and Canadian Securities Regulation (5^th ed.) (LexisNexis: 2014), co-authored with the Right Honourable David Johnston and Kathleen Rockwell. Other representative work includes articles and book chapters on innovation and regulation (also here), principles-based regulation (also here), regulatory governance and responsive regulation (also here), systemic risk in securities markets (also here), administrative law remedies, and deferred prosecution agreements and corporate monitorships (also here). Open Source access to other work is here. Her work in both securities regulation and administrative law has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Professor Ford co-edited the leading international journal Regulation & Governance from 2012 to 2015. She now sits on its Executive Board, the Board of the Journal of International Economic Law, and the Oxford Business Law Blog’s Academic Editors team. She has been retained on several occasions by the Canadian Department of Finance to advise on banking and securities regulation. In 2022 she was appointed to the Canadian Securities Administrators’ inaugural Investor Advisory Panel. Provincially, she currently serves on advisory boards to the Law Society (on its Innovation Sandbox), Access to Justice BC, CLEBC, and (as the Independent Member of its Strategic Advisory Board) CIFA-BC. She is also a member of the UNODC’s Second Task Force on Corruption Measurement.

Professor Ford has also been a Killam Faculty Research Fellow at UBC, a member of the BC Attorney General’s 2020 Advisory Committee on pandemic-related backlog in the courts, has received the Curtis Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, and served as Associate Dean for the Research and the Legal Profession. She lectures nationally and internationally, and has held visiting research positions at institutions including the European University Institute (as a Fernand Braudel Fellow), Hebrew University, Oxford University (as a Plumer Fellow at St. Anne’s), and Utrecht University.

Professor Ford obtained her graduate degrees from Columbia Law School, where she also taught as a lecturer, clinic supervisor, and Associate-in-Law. Before joining academia, she practiced law in Vancouver and New York. Her practice as a senior associate in securities regulation and financial litigation at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP included many of the highest profile regulatory and white-collar criminal files of the dotcom bust and post-9/11 eras. She is a non-practicing member of the BC and the New York state and federal bars.