Professor Shannon O'Byrne is Edinburgh-bound. O'Byrne has been awarded a MacCormick Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh Law School for the 2017/18 academic year and will spend October 2017 in residence as a MacCormick Fellow. She will present a MacCormick Seminar on her work during the course of her visit.
O'Byrne's Fall 2017 sabbatical will be spent researching "The Duty of Good Faith in Contractual Performance: A Scottish-Canadian Comparison" with her collaborator, Dr. Remus Valsan, an Edinburgh Law School Lecturer in Corporate Law. Valsan - no stranger to UAlberta Law - gave a guest lecture here in June 2015 and completed his LLM under the supervision of Vice Dean Moin Yahya.
With regards to her project, O'Byrne said that "good faith is an established civil law principle but, at least until Bhasin v Hrynew 2014 SCC 71, is classically regarded with wariness by the common law. Because Scotland is a mixed civil law-common law jurisdiction, it is significant as a comparator when assessing good faith in contract."
O'Byrne's sabbatical project also dovetails with a goal of the Edinburgh Centre for Private Law to foster dialogue between civil and common law traditions.