The Queen’s community is remembering Professor Arthur (Art) Cockfield, a highly esteemed and cherished teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. Art died unexpectedly on Jan. 9, 2022, from an unsuspected heart condition. He was 54.
Art was one of the world’s leading tax law scholars, a policy consultant, and an innovative instructor, serving most recently as Professor and Associate Dean (Academic Policy) in the Faculty of Law.
“Art Cockfield has left an indelible imprint on laws and policies in Canada and around the world, as well as on the Queen’s Law community members near and far who’ve known him from student to professor,” says Dean Mark Walters (Law’89). “He was a main--stay of our law school, a loyal and dedicated teacher who cared deeply for his students, and a cherished mentor and friend to so many of us.”
After completing his undergraduate studies at Western University, Art attended Queen’s Law, earning his LLB in 1993, and becoming involved in the Kingston community with Queen’s Legal Aid (QLA) as a student. He would later earn a Master of the Science of Law (JSM) and Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD) from Stanford University.
Art returned to Queen’s as a faculty member in 2001 as a Queen’s National Scholar. With Queen’s Surveillance Studies Centre, he served on the Executive Board and was a co-investigator in several large-scale research projects. Among other appointments, he had been a Fulbright Visiting Chair in Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and taught at the University of West Indies in Barbados.
Art also served as a legal and policy consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations, the Department of Justice, the Department of Finance, the Advisory Panel on Canada’s System of Inter-national Taxation, the National Judicial Institute, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
Art was featured prominently in the media and legal sector as a pre-eminent authority on tax law, financial crime, e-commerce, privacy, and legal ethics. He shared his expertise and commitment to legal excellence with law students for over two decades. Former student Mark Cavdar (Law’13), says, “Professor Cockfield was a natural communicator, injecting everything he taught with his distinctive voice and humour. What made him unique for me was his candor, his utmost respect for and deference to the foundations of our common law, and his ability to dialogue with a room of aspiring lawyers in a language that they inherently understood.”
Among Art’s surviving family members are his mother, Gale Clost Costen, and sons Arthur (Com’18), Jack, and William.