Dayna Nadine Scott joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2006 after completing a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at McGill’s Faculty of Law. Her Master's thesis entitled "Carbon Sinks Science and the Kyoto Protocol: Controversy as Opportunity for Paradigmatic Policy Shifts" won the York University Thesis Prize in 2001. After completing a judicial clerkship at the Federal Court of Canada and being called to the Bar of Ontario, Dayna returned to Osgoode Hall Law School to pursue her Ph.D.  Dayna spent 2004-2005 as a Fulbright Scholar and a visiting doctoral researcher in the Hauser Global Law School program at NYU School of Law in New York.  She defended her dissertation, The Mutual Constitution of Risk and Precaution: A Study of the Precautionary Principle in Action, in 2005. The dissertation judges the transformative potential of international law’s “precautionary principle” as a legal, rhetorical and regulatory strategy for managing environmental health risks. Professor Scott works in the areas of environmental law and policy; critical risk theory; environmental justice; law and science; biotechnology policy; toxic torts; and trade and globalization. She is interested in questions of environmental regulation and governance from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially work that interrogates the interaction between local and global modes of governing and ways of knowing.

Recent publications of note include a domestic case study of the application of the precautionary principle in a public health setting (“When Precaution Points Two Ways:  Confronting “West Nile Fever”” (2005) 20(2) Canadian Journal of Law and Society 27; a critical examination of Canada’s regulatory regime for genetically modified foods or “novel foods” through the lens of the sociology of risk literature (“Risk as a Technique of Governance in an Era of Biotechnological Innovation”, invited for the Law Commission of Canada volume, Risk & Trust, forthcoming from Fernwood Press, 2006); a book review of  Sheila Jasanoff & Marybeth Long Martello (eds.) Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance, MIT Press, 2004,  (“Law as Local Knowledge” (2005) 1  McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy 81); and a discursive analysis of the current trade dispute over GMOs at the WTO (Nature/Culture Clash: The Transnational Trade in GMOs, Global Law Working Paper Series 2005 edited by J.H.H. Weiler, New York University School of Law, http://www.nyulawglobal.org/GLWP_0605.htm).