Research

Dr. O’Regan has written on Canadian criminal law and procedure, copyright law, sexual assault, and feminist legal theory. She is co-editor of Thinking About Criminal Justice in Canada, 2nd edn (Emond Publishing, 2017) and author of Law & Consent: Contesting the Common Sense (Routledge, 2020). Her current research focuses on the socio-legal context of sexual violence, with a specific concentration on sexual assault. She recently collaborated with the Fredericton Sexual Assault Centre to conduct a review of unfounded sexual assault cases for the Fredericton Police and is currently working with the Centre to develop trauma-informed educational materials on sexual consent. Her recent book, Law & Consent: Contesting the Common Sense (Routledge, forthcoming 2019), examines the role of consent in sexual assault law, informed consent to medical treatment, and the legal regulation of bodily harm in sports. In 2018, Dr. O’Regan was appointed a Research Fellow of the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research.

Areas of Interest

Dr. O’Regan has teaching and research interests in criminal law and legal theory, with a specific focus on how law and cultural norms inform one another in the regulation of violence and the constitution of subjectivity. She has supervised students conducting discourse analyses of sentencing judgments, newspaper accounts of missing and murdered women, and social media talk about sexual assault. She is always interested in the use of feminist and queer theory lenses to look at law. Her current research activities are focused on consent, unfounded sexual assault classification predictors, and gender-based violence in RPG gaming mods.