David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights

Working Group Call for Proposals
2012-08-02
The Asper Centre working groups aim to provide U of T students with an opportunity to conduct legal research and assist in advocacy on Canadian constitutional rights issues (often in partnership with an external organization).
The Asper Centre requires all potential working groups (including existing working groups) to submit a written proposal for consideration by the Asper Centre Working Groups Selection Committee (“the Committee”). The Committee will select the most competitive proposals to form the Asper Centre Working Groups for the following year.
The purpose of the proposal requirement is to enhance the student experience and to ensure that our assistance is of the highest quality and value to our partners. The proposal-based working group model facilitates oversight by the Centre’s Executive Director, allows for further engagement with faculty, and ensures consistency across working groups.
Please contact Cheryl Milne if you need additional information or ideas to form a working group.
Link to Call for Proposals with application instructions.
ASPER CENTRE OUTLOOK NEWSLETTER: If you wish to become a newsletter editor for 2012-2013, please submit an email to Cheryl Milne with an outline of your experience by the deadline for working group application (5:00 pm, August 2, 2012).

Judging Social Rights
2013-01-10 12:30 - 14:00 (America/Toronto)
CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE
and the
International Human Rights Program
present
Jeff King, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University College, London
Thursday, January 10, 2013
12:30 – 2:00
Room FLC, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law
78 Queen’s Park
Jeff King is a distinguished visitor this year at the Faculty of Law, teaching an intensive course on social rights. His discussion will focus on some of the central themes of his book, Judging Social Rights (Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law). His book offers an extended argument about why abstract social rights to housing, education, health care, and social security should be part of constitutions. He argues that judges should be able to interpret and enforce social rights, including by striking down legislation, but should act incrementally, taking small steps to expand the coverage of existing rules and principles in a controlled fashion.
Jeff King, BA Hons in Phil (Ottawa) 1996, LLB/BCL (McGill) 2002, MSt (Oxford) 2006, DPhil (Oxford) 2009, is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Laws University College London, where he teaches public law, human rights, and legal and constitutional theory. He is Co-Editor of the journal Current Legal Problems. Previously, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford (2008-2010), a Research Fellow and Tutor in public law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). His research and teaching broadly examines doctrinal, theoretical and empirical aspects of comparative public law. He has published articles on the justiciability of resource allocation, judicial restraint, complexity in adjudication, the function of constitutions, the value of legal accountability, proportionality in administrative law, odious debt in international law, and a monograph setting out the case for constitutional social rights and a theory of adjudication in respect of them.
For more workshop information and a copy of the draft paper, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca

Common Good, Public Reason and Constitutional Law
2013-01-24 12:30 - 14:00
Wojciech Sadurski, University of Sydney
The most feasible conception of the common good is one that refers to the legitimate motives for proposing and enacting collective authoritative decisions, which can be applied to, and complied with by, those who do not necessarily agree with the substantive merits of those decisions. Concretization of such a conception is found in the idea of public reason, elaborated upon with some sophistication by political liberals, most influentially by John Rawls. When properly modified in response to its critics (notably Ronald Dworkin), this idea resonates with a popular constitutional doctrine which calls for invalidation of laws tainted by wrong (i.e. unconstitutional) motives; thus the concept of public reason may be a useful tool in identifying which motives should be found unconstitutional. As scrutiny reliant upon the second-guessing of actual legislative motives is potentially unworkable, what is needed is an “objectified” approach to the motives. This can be detected through reasonableness analysis, perhaps supported by the device of proportionality. But there are limits to the arbitrary “manufacturing” of reasons, and the test of public reason is of value not only in the scrutiny of laws already enacted, but also as an appeal to lawmakers that only some types of arguments should be used in public discourse. While at first blush it may be seen as a prescription for hypocrisy, in fact the concept of public reason may play an important therapeutic and reflexive role: it may teach us to use only such arguments in public discourse which are respectful of fellow citizens who may disagree due to varying ideologies, religions and philosophical outlooks.
Event date: Thursday, January 24, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM
Location: Solarium, Falconer Hall, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Wojciech Sadurski is Challis Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney and Professor of the Centre for Europe at Warsaw University. He has taught at several institutions around the world, such as Cornell Law School and Cardozo Law School in the United States, and at universities across Europe: in Trento, Paris and Warsaw. He was Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the European University Institute in Florence from 1999-2009, serving as Head of Department of the Law at the EUI in 2003-2006. Specialising in philosophy of law, political theory, constitutional theory and comparative constitutional law, his most recent books include: Rights Before Courts: A Study of Constitutional Courts in Postcommunist States of Central and Eastern Europe (Springer, 2005), Equality and Legitimacy (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Constitutionalism and the Enlargement of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012). A member of a number of governing and programme bodies of think tanks and NGOs dealing with human rights and democracy promotion, he is currently Chairman of Academic Advisory Board of the Community of Democracies. A full profile and list of publications is available at http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/staff/WojciechSadurski/index.shtml.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information and a copy of the draft paper, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca

R v Morgentaler: Reflections After 25 Years
2013-01-29 17:30 - 19:30
Panel Discussion
On January 28, 1988, 25 years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law using the still new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The legal battle was long, dramatic and groundbreaking – including a police raid on a clinic, novel constitutional evidence and arguments, an extraordinary criminal jury trial, and an acquittal overturned by the Court of Appeal, followed by a week-long hearing and divided decision at the Supreme Court level. Today, the case remains one of the most significant decisions in Canadian law. This panel provides a unique opportunity to hear from participants in the case as they reflect on the historic events and the continued significance of the case today.
Panelists: Dr. Robert Scott – Appellant and Co-Accused
Morris Manning, QC – Counsel for the Appellants
Kirk Makin – Justice Reporter with the Globe and Mail
Lorraine Weinrib – Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Carolyn Egan – Expert witness at trial
(Others to be confirmed)
Moderators: Paul Schabas – Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP and co-counsel for the Appellant
Cheryl Milne – Executive Director, David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights
Read more about this event here.
Listen to an excerpt of the event from CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE RECORDING OF THE EVENT

Event date: Tuesday, January 29, 2013, from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM
Location: Bennett Lecture Hall, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Social and Economic Rights - A South African Perspective
2013-02-14 12:30 - 14:00
Zak Yacoob
Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Event date: Thursday, February 14, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM
Location: Room B, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Judge Yacoob has been a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He is married to Anu. The couple have two children. He has been blind for almost all his life. Judge Yacoob became a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in February 1998 and retired from active service on 31 January 2013. Justice Yacoob was appointed Acting Deputy Chief Justice from 1 February 2012 to 31 May 2012. He wrote the Court’s decision in the Grootboom case involving housing rights under the South African constitution.
He attended a special school and attained a law degree at an apartheid university for Indians. In May 2010 he received an LLD honoris causa from the University of Fort Hare, South Africa. The same degree was conferred upon him by the University of KwaZulu-Natal in April 2011.
Judge Yacoob practised as an advocate for 25 years. Much of this was concerned with using the law in the struggle against apartheid and for democracy. He was a member of the underground of the African National Congress and other community organisations. He was a member of the Independent Electoral Commission and of the Independent Panel of Experts that advised the National Assembly on the drafting of the South African Constitution. Judge Yacoob has attended dozens of international conferences and workshops on topics as varied as blindness, children and democracy.
Link to the Grootboom decision.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information and a copy of the Grootboom decision please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca

2013 Morris A Gross Memorial Lecture
2013-02-27 16:00 - 17:30
The Honourable Lynn Smith
The Quest for a Charter Equality Test: Has the Longest Way Round Been the Shortest Way Home?
Watch the webcast here.
Event date: Wednesday, February 27, 2013, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Location: Rowell Room, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Lynn Smith, B.A. (University of Calgary), LL.B. (University of British Columbia), LL.D. (Hon.) (Simon Fraser University) was appointed to the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1998. She served as a Justice of that Court until her retirement in September 2012. Prior to her appointment as a judge, she practised law at Shrum, Liddle and Hebenton (now McCarthy Tetrault), specializing in civil litigation. She taught law at the University of British Columbia 1981-97 in areas including Constitutional Law, Evidence, Civil Litigation, and Real Property. She has published books and articles in the fields of Charter equality rights, civil litigation and evidence, human rights, administrative law, and women’s equality. She was Dean of the U.B.C. Law Faculty 1991-97. In 2005-06, Lynn Smith was Executive Director of the National Judicial Institute, on secondment from the Court. She is a Judicial Associate of the National Judicial Institute and serves on the faculty of the Charter and Evidence Workshops as well as the New Federally-Appointed Judges Program. She has been involved in international judicial education exchanges with China, Scotland, Ghana and Viet Nam. During a Judicial Study Leave in 2009-10, she researched credibility assessment, examining the psychological and social science literature as well as the law. She published a paper on that topic, and prepared a program on credibility assessment used in National Judicial Institute seminars. Lynn Smith was the Chair of the B.C. Supreme Court Law Clerks Committee and of the Committee on Communications Technology, whose report was adopted by the Court in May, 2012. Commencing in January, 2013, she is teaching a seminar on Constitutional Litigation at the U.B.C. Faculty of Law. She is married to Jon Sigurdson, who is a Justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia. They have two daughters, Elin Sigurdson and Krista Sigurdson.
The Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture was established in memory of the late Morris A. Gross by the law firm Minden Gross LLP and by members of his family, friends and professional associates. The intention of the lectureship is to, every two years, bring to the Faculty of Law a distinguished scholar or a member of the practising bar or bench for discussion with the student body and Faculty, and to deliver the bi-annual Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture.
This event is being co-sponsored by the JOHN AND MARY YAREMKO FUND FOR MULTICULTURALISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS.
For more information, contact Cheryl Milne cheryl.milne@utoronto.ca

Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change
2013-03-04 12:30 - 14:00
Craig Scott

Member of Parliament for Toronto-Danforth

This lecture will discuss the structure and philosophy of the Supreme Court of Canada’s approach to the dynamics of constitutional change, including the stages necessary to move from the democratic expression of a desire for change to lawful amendment of the Constitution. Scott will discuss his legislative proposal, An Act Respecting Democratic Constitutional Change recently tabled as a bill in the House of Commons.
Craig Scott is MP for Toronto-Danforth (NDP), having been elected in March 2012 in a by-election called following the passing of Jack Layton. He is the Official Opposition Critic for Democratic and Parliamentary Reform. Prior to being elected, he was on faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School (2000-2012) and University of Toronto Faculty of Law (1989-2000).
Craig Scott, MP, Toronto-Danforth, 741 Broadview Ave, Suite 304, Toronto, ON M4K 3Y3 Tel: 4164058914; 914, Confederation Bldg, Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6, Tel: 6139929381.
A light lunch will be served.
Read the Bill Here
For more workshop information, please contact kara.norrington@utoronto.ca

Event date: Monday, March 04, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM
Location: Room FLA, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Exit, Voice, and Disloyalty
2013-03-14 12:30 - 14:00
Constitutional Roundtable
Professor Heather Gerkin
Yale Law School
Abstract: Much of constitutional theory is preoccupied with a single question: what does a democracy owe its minorities? And most of the answers to this question fit naturally into the two categories Hirschman made famous: voice and exit. On both the rights side and structural side of constitutional theory, scholars worry about providing minorities with an adequate level of influence. And the solutions they propose almost inevitably offer minorities a chance at voice or exit, as if no other options existed. Professor Gerken will argue that exit and voice are not the only options available to a minority group seeking influence. That’s because much of the nation’s administrative structure looks more like Tocqueville’s democracy than Weber’s bureaucracy. In our highly decentralized and partially politicized system, minorities can wield influence over national policy by virtue of the fact that they routinely administer it. As policymaking insiders, minorities can resist federal policy from within rather than challenge it from without. Professor Gerken will explore the implications of this institutional fact and explain why constitutional theory has long neglected this important form of minority power.
Heather Gerken is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School where she specializes in election law, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Professor Gerken is one of the country’s leading experts on voting rights and election law, the role of groups in the democratic process, and the relationship between diversity and democracy. A native of Massachusetts, Professor Gerken graduated from Princeton University, where she received her A.B. degree summa cum laude in 1991, and from the University of Michigan Law School, where she received her J.D. summa cum laude in 1994. She then served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court, before entering private practice in Washington, D.C. In 2000 Professor Gerken became an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, where she was granted tenure and won the Sachs-Freund teaching award. She joined the Yale faculty in 2006. She is currently working on a book on the trans-substantive concept of “second-order diversity” in American public law.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information and a copy of the draft paper, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
Event date: Thursday, March 14, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM
Location: Room FLA, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Clinic Application Deadline
2013-07-03
CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: DAVID ASPER CENTRE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (LAW391H1F) FALL 2013
CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: HALF TERM CLINIC – WINTER 2014
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law students wishing to apply for these courses must email a 1-2 page statement of interest to Cheryl Milne, cheryl.milne@utoronto.ca by July 3, 2013. Please indicate the following:

(a) previous upper-year courses in constitutional law or human rights law or experience that you consider to be equivalent (note pre/co-requisite for half-term clinic);
(b) indicators of academic, analytical and research and writing ability, which may include grades in related classes;
(c) any experience in human rights or constitutional issues;
(d) any experience with lawyering or advocacy;
(e) why you wish to enroll in the Clinic.
Successful applicants will be notified of admission in time for course registration prior to July 10, 2013.

Deadline: Working Group Proposals
2013-07-31
UofT law students who wish to submit proposals to lead voluntary Working Groups for the 2013-2014 year, must complete the proposals and submit them by 5:00 p.m. on July 31, 2013.

Deadline: Call for Papers - September 30, 2013
2013-09-30
Constitutional Remedies: Are They Effective and Meaningful?
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, St. George Campus – February 28, 2014
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights invites papers for its upcoming conference examining in detail the remedies available in constitutional litigation.
The Centre invites papers that stimulate and develop an ongoing dialogue on the effectiveness of remedies. The goal is to thoroughly examine the available remedies pursuant to s.24 and s.52 of the Charter as well as remedies for the violation of Aboriginal and treaty rights under the constitution. Key themes include the following.
· Will the promise of the Ward Charter damage claim be realized? Issues related to the quantum of damages in relation to the costs and risks of litigation; the interaction between Charter and tort claims and the role of Charter damages and class actions.
· The role of injunctions and declarations: Would/should the Supreme Court affirm supervisory jurisdiction as it did in Doucet Boudreau if it heard the case today; are injunctions necessary or will declarations suffice including in litigation with respect to conditions of confinement and positive rights? What can be learned from comparative experiences?
· Remedies for violations of Aboriginal and treaty rights: What are the remedies for breach of the duty to consult and are they meaningful and effective?
· Remedies for unconstitutional legislation: Are the courts employing the soft remedies of reading down and suspended declarations of invalidity too much?
Other conference themes may include issues such as the evidence necessary to justify a particular remedy; remedies in the criminal law context; the remedial role of costs awards; interlocutory injunctions in the constitutional context; and jurisdiction to award Charter remedies.
The papers will be utilized as the central themes on various panels across the one day conference and selected conference papers will be considered for publication as part of a special issue of the National Journal of Constitutional Law. Authors of papers chosen for presentation will be notified by October 31, 2013. Final (for the conference) papers are due by January 31, 2014.
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights is a centre within the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law devoted to advocacy, research and education in the areas of constitutional rights in Canada.
For those interested in participating, please send an abstract (max: 250 words) of your intended paper with a 1-2 paragraph biography to: Cheryl Milne at cheryl.milne@utoronto.ca
Deadline for Submissions: September 30, 2013

The Indigenous as Alien
2013-11-01 12:30 - 14:00
Constitutional Roundtable
Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies &
Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism
present
Leti Volpp
UC Berkeley School of Law
The Indigenous as Alien
Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous populations. To show how this takes place, this Essay examines the way immigration law narrates space, time, and membership. But despite this disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in U.S. immigration law, and thus, the Essay describes the neglected legal history of the treatment of American Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law. The paper then returns to explain why Indians have disappeared from U.S. immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between We the People, the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.”
Leti Volpp is the Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches courses on immigration and citizenship. Her most recent publications include “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law,” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery,” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition,” in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies(2011). Forthcoming work includes “Civility and the Alien,” in Civility, Legality and the Limits of Justice (Austin Sarat, ed., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Event date: Friday, November 01, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

Location: Room 108N, North House, Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place

Asper Centre's Fifth Anniversary Symposium
2013-11-08 13:00 - 17:00
Event date: Friday, November 08, 2013, from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: Victoria Chapel, Victoria College, University of Toronto
The Asper Centre will celebrate 5 years of accomplishments with 2 panel discussions that explore the significance of the cases in which the Centre has intervened, followed by a reception.
PROGRAM
1:00 – 1:15 p.m. Why We Do the Things We Do
Executive Director, Cheryl Milne will discuss how and why the Centre has chosen the cases it has.
1:15- 2:45 Looking Forward to the Future of Charter Litigation
Panelists will look at the impact that such cases as Canada v Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence, Caron v Alberta and others, will have in shaping future litigation. Panelists will include Joseph Arvay QC, Michal Fairburn and Fay Faraday.
2:45 – 4:15 Looking Back on the Last Five Years of Constitutional Remedies
Panelists John Norris, current Constitutional Litigator in Residence, Christopher Bredt, and Professor Kent Roach will reflect on the cases that in which the Asper Centre has participated including Prime Minister of Canada v Khadr, Vancouver (City of) v Ward and Conway v The Queen.
4:15 Keynote: Nathalie Des Rosiers, Dean of University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, and former General Counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Reception to follow with Dean Mayo Moran and David Asper.

Ethical Basis for Excluding Unauthorized Immigrants from the Affordable Care Act
2013-11-21 12:30 - 14:00
Health Law, Ethics & Policy Workshop Series
David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights & International Human Rights Program
present
SPEAKER: Norman Daniels, Harvard School of Public Health
Ethical Basis for Excluding Unauthorized Immigrants from the Affordable Care Act
COMMENTATOR: Audrey Macklin, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is intended to close the insurance gap in the US but the single largest group it excludes from coverage is the group of unauthorized (“undocumented” or “illegal”) immigrants, some 12 million people. Should they have been included? After all, in the U.S., even unauthorized immigrant cannot be excluded from emergency room services. Two arguments, one based on reciprocity the other on community membership, support a presumption for inclusion, and the ground for exclusion do not warrant their omission. We examine these arguments after first arguing that some claims of global justice, for example, that national borders should be “open,” fail an important test of feasibility on claims of justice.
Norman Daniels is Mary B. Saltonstall Professor and Professor of Ethics and Population Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Formerly Goldthwaite Professor, Chair of the Tufts Philosophy Department, and Professor of Medical Ethics at Tufts Medical School. He has published over 150 articles in anthologies and journals. His books include Just Health Care (Cambridge, 1985); Am I My Parents’ Keeper? An Essay on Justice Between the Young and the Old (Oxford, 1988); Seeking Fair Treatment: From the AIDS Epidemic to National Health Care Reform, Oxford, 1995); Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1996); (with Donald Light and Ronald Caplan) Benchmarks of Fairness for Health Care Reform (Oxford, 1996); (with Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, and Dan Wikler) From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge, 2000); (with Bruce Kennedy and Ichiro Kawachi) Is Inequality Bad for Our Health? (Beacon Press, 2000); and (with James Sabin) Setting Limits Fairly: Can We Learn to Share Medical Resources? (Oxford, 2002; 2nd edition 2008). His Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly (CUP, 2008) is a sequel to Just Health Care and integrates his work into a comprehensive theory of justice for health.

Event date: Thursday, November 21, 2013, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

Location: Alumni Hall, Victoria College

"Generous" to a Fault? The Supreme Court of Canada's Approach to Section 6(1) of the Charter
2014-01-15 12:30 - 14:00
CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE SERIES
presents
John Norris
Constitutional Litigator in Residence
David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights
“Generous” to a Fault? The Supreme Court of Canada’s Approach to
Section 6(1) of the Charter
John Norris maintains a trial and appellate practice in criminal, constitutional and national security law. He is a Special Advocate for security certificate proceedings, and acts regularly for public interest groups on appeals before the Supreme Court of Canada. John is an adjunct member of the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and is an active contributor to continuing legal education. He is the Asper Centre’s Constitutional-Litigator-in-Residence for 2013. John is a Director of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers. He is an Assistant Editor of the Canadian Rights Reporter, and has authored several scholarly articles. In 2011, John received the Catzman Award for Professionalism and Civility in the practice of law from the Advocates’ Society. John received his LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1991 and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1993.

Event date: Wednesday, January 15, 2014, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

Location: Solarium – Falconer Hall, 84 Queen’s Park

Religious Diversity, Education, and the "Crisis" in State Neutrality
2014-01-29 12:30 - 14:00
CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE
presents
Benjamin Berger
Osgoode Hall Law School
Religious Diversity, Education, and the “Crisis” in State Neutrality
Education – and particularly public education – has become a crucible for the relationship between state and religious diversity, a principal site for contemporary debates about the meaning of secularism and the management of religious difference. This is so across a variety of national traditions, and despite wide differences in the historical and “emotional inheritances” surrounding the configuration of law, politics, and religion. Through an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s thought about responsibility and freedom in education, this article works towards a better understanding of why education is such a crucial and fraught field in the modern encounter between religion and law. The article turns to the recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada to draw out the implications of these ideas, arriving ultimately at a claim about the nature and limits of the concept of state neutrality.
Professor Benjamin Berger’s areas of teaching and research specialization are criminal and constitutional law and theory, law and religion, and the law of evidence. Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Berger was an associate professor in the Faculty of Law and held a cross appointment in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, where he began teaching in 2004. He served as law clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University. He has published broadly in his principal areas of research and his work has appeared in multiple edited collections and in legal and interdisciplinary journals such as: Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence; Law, Culture and the Humanities; McGill Law Journal; Osgoode Hall Law Journal; ICON; and the Journal of Comparative Law. He is on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and is an associate editor for the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World. He is also co-editor of The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies, published by UBC Press in October 2008. He received the 2010 Canadian Association of Law Teacher’s Scholarly Paper Award for an article entitled “The Abiding Presence of Conscience: Criminal Justice Against the Law and the Modern Constitutional Imagination.” Professor Berger is active in professional and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. While at UVic Law, Professor Berger twice received the Terry J. Wuester Teaching Award, and was awarded the First Year Class Teaching Award; he received the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2013.

Event date: Wednesday, January 29, 2014, from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

Location: Alumni Hall, Victoria College

Clinic Applications Deadline
2014-07-07
CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: DAVID ASPER CENTRE FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS (LAW391H1F) FALL 2013
CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION: HALF TERM CLINIC – WINTER 2014
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law students wishing to apply for these courses must email a 1-2 page statement of interest to Cheryl Milne, cheryl.milne@utoronto.ca by July 7, 2014. Please indicate the following:
(a) previous upper-year courses in constitutional law or human rights law or experience that you consider to be equivalent (note pre/co-requisite for half-term clinic);
(b) indicators of academic, analytical and research and writing ability, which may include grades in related classes;
(c) any experience in human rights or constitutional issues;
(d) any experience with lawyering or advocacy;
(e) why you wish to enroll in the Clinic.
Successful applicants will be notified of admission in time for course registration prior to July 14, 2013.

Constitutional Roundtable- Richard Stacey
2015-02-05 12:30 - 14:00
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Richard Stacey, Faculty of Law University of Toronto
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Room 101, Victoria College
Constitutional Law in the Absence of Constitution: Power in the Revolutionary Interregnum
In early February 2011, the Egyptian armed forces assumed executive control of Egypt and suspended the 1971 Constitution. A group of academics was mandated to propose amendments to the Constitution which, once approved by referendum on 19 March, became Egypt’s ‘interim’ Constitution. A process for the drafting and adoption of a new constitution was initiated, and the 2012 Constitution was adopted by referendum in December 2012. The armed forces again assumed executive control in July 2013 and suspended the 2012 Constitution, with another new constitution approved at referendum in January 2014. During both periods of military control, it remains unclear what replaced the suspended Constitution as the country’s foundational legal instrument. The Egyptian case is an example of constitutional interregnum, where political authority is exercised in the apparent absence of any formal constitutional foundation for political authority. This paper focuses on these periods of constitutional interregnum, exploring through a number of contemporary and historical cases how the gap left by the suspension of a constitution during a period of constitutional replacement is filled. The paper argues that even without a formal written constitution, a governing body’s authority and the lawfulness of its conduct depends on adherence to supra-constitutional principles derived from the commitment to constitutional democracy itself. Because a democratic constitution claims to speak for the whole people, the law in force during the constitutional interregnum and which governs the drafting of a new constitution must, at least, treat all and each of the people as equals and affirm a democratic right to representation in the drafting process. Any meaningful claim to be exercising authority in the name of the people – a claim to the authority of popular sovereignty – implies a commitment to a set of principles capable of constraining and directing the groups or individuals who exercise authority. These principles provide a constitutional foundation for government and for the legal system during the interregnum, ensuring both a benchmark for lawful government and legal continuity.
Richard Stacey served as Director of Research at the Center for Constitutional Transitions at NYU Law until joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from New York University’s Institute for Law and Society and bachelors degrees in political theory and law from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He served as law clerk to Justice Kate O’Regan and Justice Bess Nkabinde at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and has taught courses in political theory, constitutional law, administrative law and human rights at the University of Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and the City University of New York Law School. In 2009 he was a research consultant during Kenya’s constitutional review process and has remained involved in constitutional transitions around the world, providing technical advice through the Center for Constitutional Transitions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. His work has appeared in a number of journals of law and political theory, the multi-author reference work Constitutional Law of South Africa (of which he acts as co-editor), and in books on constitutional design, land reform, and women’s rights.
A light lunch will be provided.

Constitutional Roundtable - Cristina Rodriguez
2015-10-14 12:30 - 14:00
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Cristina Rodriguez, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at  Yale Law School
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Location: Victoria College, Room VC 115
The Power to Enforce the Law: Presidential Power and American Immigration Policy
In November 2014, President Obama announced his intention to dramatically reshape immigration law through administrative channels. Together with relief policies announced in 2012, his initiatives would shield over half the population of unauthorized immigrants from removal and enable them to work in the United States. These events have drawn renewed attention to the President’s power to shape immigration law. They also have reignited a longstanding controversy about whether constitutional limits exist on a central source of executive authority: the power to enforce the law.
In using the Obama relief policies to explore these dynamics, we make two central claims. First, it is futile to try to constrain the enforcement power by tying it to a search for congressional enforcement priorities. Congress has no discernible priorities when it comes to a very wide swath of enforcement activity—a reality especially true for immigration law today. The immigration code has evolved over time into a highly reticulated statute through the work of numerous Congresses and political coalitions. The modern structure of immigration law also effectively delegates vast screening authority to the President. Interlocking historical, political, and legislative developments have opened a tremendous gap between the law on the books and the law on the ground. Under these conditions, there can be no meaningful search for congressionally preferred screening criteria. Far from reflecting a faithful agent framework, then, immigration enforcement more closely resembles a two-principals model of policymaking—one in which the Executive can and should help construct the domain of regulation through its independent judgments about how and when to enforce the law.
Second, when exploring limits on the enforcement power, we should focus not on who benefits from enforcement discretion but on how the Executive institutionalizes its discretion. The Obama relief initiatives are innovative: they bind the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to a more rule-like decision-making process, constrain the judgments of line-level officials by subjecting them to centralized supervision, and render the exercise of enforcement discretion far more transparent to the public than is customary. These efforts to better organize the enforcement bureaucracy ultimately advance core rule of law values without undermining deterrence or legal compliance, as some critics have worried. Moreover, while our focus on discretion’s institutionalization requires contextualized judgments that may rarely translate into clear doctrinal rules to govern the enforcement power, we believe it is generally unnecessary and unwise to use constitutional law to limit the President’s authority over how to organize the enforcement bureaucracy.
Cristina M. Rodríguez was appointed Professor of Law at Yale Law School in January 2013. From 2011-2013, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and from 2004-2012 she was on the faculty at the NYU School of Law. Professor Rodriguez also has been a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Henry L. Stimson Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, she clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Professor Rodriguez’s fields of research and teaching include immigration law; constitutional law and theory; administrative law and process; language rights and language policy; and citizenship theory. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she earned a B.A. in History from Yale College in 1995, a Master of Letters in Modern History in 1998 from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2000.

Constitutional Roundtable - Raj Anand
2016-02-03 12:30 - 14:00
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Raj Anand
Constitutional Litigator in Residence with the Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
Victoria College, Room 206
Topic: Subsection 15(2) of the Charter and its Disconnection with Substantive Equality
Raj Anand is a partner and an arbitrator and mediator with WeirFoulds LLP. His practice includes the areas of administrative, human rights, constitutional and employment law, civil litigation, professional negligence and regulation. In his third term as an elected Bencher of the Law Society, he is currently the Vice-Chair of the Law Society Tribunal’s Hearing Division. He was a member of task forces or working groups on admission requirements, articling, good character, Law Society governance and Tribunal reform. He was Vice Chair of the Equity and Aboriginal Issues Committee for five years, and is currently Co-Chair of the Working Group on Challenges faced by Racialized Lawyers and Paralegals in Ontario and Chair of the Three Year Review of the Tribunal reforms. Raj graduated from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law with the Dean’s Key in 1978. He has served as President of the U of T Law Alumni Council, the Minority Advocacy and Rights Council, the International Commission of Jurists Canada, and Pro Bono Law Ontario; Co-Chair of the U of T Tribunal; and board member of the Advocates’ Society, Legal Aid Ontario, the Law Commission of Ontario, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Justice for Children and Youth, and the Income Security Advocacy Centre. Raj was Chief Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission in 1988-89, Board of Inquiry from 1989-94, and founding Chair of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre in 2008-10. Raj has taught “The New Administrative Law” at the masters level, and “Legal Ethics: Legal Values” and “Diversity and the Legal Profession” at the JD level. He was the first recipient of the Advocates’ Society Award of Justice in 1997, and has since received the Law Society Medal, the Professional Man of the Year award of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce, and the South Asian Bar Association’s Distinguished Career Award. In 2013, he was an inaugural Roy McMurtry Visiting Clinical Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Morris A. Gross Lecture - the Honourable George R. Strathy, Chief Justice of Ontario
2017-01-19 16:30 - 18:00
Judicial Courage and Restraint in Canadian Constitutional History
The Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture was established in memory of the late Morris A. Gross by the law firm Minden Gross LLP and by members of his family, friends and professional associates. The intention of the lectureship is to, every two years, bring to the Faculty of Law a distinguished scholar or a member of the practicing bar or bench for discussion with the student body and Faculty, and to deliver the bi-annual Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture.
This year, the Morris A. Gross Memorial Lecture will be delivered by the Honourable George R. Strathy, Chief Justice of Ontario, as an introduction to the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights’ 2017 Constitutional Roundtable series, which will be in celebration of Canada’s Sesquicentennial.
The Honourable George R. Strathy was appointed Chief Justice of Ontario June 13, 2014. He was appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario on April 25, 2013. For the previous five years he served as a judge of the Superior Court of Justice in the Toronto Region, where he presided over civil, class action and criminal matters. Chief Justice Strathy received a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in 1970 and was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to pursue graduate studies. He received a Master of Arts degree in International Relations at the University of Toronto in 1971. He attended the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and was awarded the Gold Medal in 1974.
In practice, he specialized in civil litigation, with particular emphasis in Maritime and Transportation Law. He was a partner in the firms of MacKinnon, McTaggart, Campbell Godfrey and Lewtas, and Fasken Martineau Walker before establishing his own firm in 1991. The firm ultimately became Strathy & Isaacs. He was active in a number of professional organizations, including the Canadian Bar Association (Chair of the Young Lawyers’ Division and member of the Executive Committee), the Canadian Maritime Law Association (Vice-President), the Canadian Association of Maritime Arbitrations (Vice-President), and the Canadian Association of Average Adjusters (Chairman). He is the author of two books on marine insurance in Canada as well as numerous papers and articles.
Chief Justice Strathy is married to Elyse Strathy. They have five daughters and seven grandchildren. He is an enthusiastic, but not particularly talented, squash player, golfer and tandem cyclist.

Above the Law? The proposed Better Local Government Act constitutional challenge and Premier Ford's use of the Notwithstanding Clause
2018-09-20 16:30 - 18:00 | J250 Jackman Law Building
See EVENT POSTER here.
On September 10, 2018 Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba ruled that Premier Doug Ford’s Bill 5 – the so-called Better Local Government Act – to reduce Toronto’s city council from 47 wards to 25, breached s. 2(b) of the Charter and was therefore unconstitutional. Shortly thereafter Premier Ford announced that not only was his government going to appeal the court’s decision, but he was going to invoke the Constitution’s “notwithstanding clause” for the first time in Ontario’s history to override the judge’s decision. The revised Bill has been introduced in the legislature with debates lasting into the late night; while a stay application, pending the appeal of the court decision, has been scheduled for Tuesday, September 18th.
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights is convening a moderated panel discussion in order to unpack the various legal issues involved in this unprecedented case. Panel members will include two of our faculty’s Constitutional Law Professors Lorraine Weinrib and Yasmin Dawood, and litigator Steven Barrett of Goldblatt Partners LLP.
Please join us on Thursday September 20, 2018 at 4:30pm-6:00pm in J250 Jackman Law Building, for this timely event.
Email tal.schreier@utoronto.ca for information.
No Registration Required.

Constitutional Roundtable with Professor Kent Roach
2019-02-05 12:30 - 14:00 | J140 Jackman Law Building, 78 Queen's Park Cres, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C5, Canada
On Tuesday, February 5, 2019, University of Toronto Faculty of Law Professor Kent Roach presented a Constitutional Roundtable titled “Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley/Colten Boushie Case.”
In this Constitutional Roundtable, Gerald Stanley’s trial for the killing of Colten Boushie, a 22 year old Cree man, will be examined in its broader historical, political and legal context with attention to the role of equality rights in jury selection and trial procedures. The jury selection reforms proposed in Bill C-75 will also be examined as will the role of the RCMP and other policing services.
BIO
Kent Roach is Professor of Law and Prichard-Wilson Chair of Law and Public Policy at the Faculty of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Yale University, and a former law clerk to Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada. He has served as research director in multiple inquiries, and represented Aboriginal and civil liberties groups in many interventions before the courts. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2013 he was one of four academics awarded a Trudeau Fellowship.
No registration required. Light Lunch provided.

Indigenous Family Law: A Panel Discussion on the Beaver v Hill case
2019-03-21 12:30 - 14:00 | J125 Jackman Law Building
The Asper Centre Indigenous Rights student working group is pleased to present a lunchtime panel discussion on Thursday March 21, 2019 at 12h30.
Brittany Beaver and Ken Hill are Haudenosaunee parents to a ten-year-old son. She is a student; he co-founded a successful cigarette company and earns millions of dollars each year. Their relationship ended in 2013, and Mr. Hill has since argued that Haudenosonee, not Ontario law, should guide his spousal and child support payments.
Three constitutional and family law practitioners will be discussing the case and related issues, including which families’ Indigenous legal systems should apply, and whether Indigenous self-governance can be an individual right or only a collective one.
Panelists are Scott Byers (Martha McCarthy & Co.), Jessica Orkin (Goldblatt Partners) and Judith Rae (Olthuis Kleer Townshend).
Professor Carol Rogerson will be moderating.
No registration required and light lunch will be provided.

Asper Centre & IHRP student working group Information and Sign-up session
2019-09-10 12:30 - 14:00 | J250 Jackman Law Building
For current JD students at UTLaw only

JD students in all years can volunteer with one of the Asper Centre student working groups, or IHRP student working groups that are led by upper year law students. Working groups draft policy briefs, organize workshops, and conduct research on emerging constitutional/charter rights issues and international human rights topics.
This year, the Asper Centre is pleased to support the following 4 working groups:

I. Right to Equality in Accommodation: Access to adequate, appropriate, and affordable housing is a growing problem for many people in Ontario, especially those from marginalized groups. Low vacancy rates make affordable housing more difficult to find, and also increase the potential for housing discrimination, because landlords can be highly selective. Section 21.1 of the Ontario Human Rights Code states that the right to equal treatment with respect to accommodation does not apply where an accommodation is in a dwelling where the occupants share a kitchen or bathroom with the landlord or their family. This means that Ontarians who would otherwise be protected from discrimination based on code grounds are not. This working group will be assisting CERA (the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation) by preparing a research memo on the exemption of shared residential accommodation from the human rights code, which will support CERA’s future goal of challenging the constitutionality of S. 21.1 of the Ontario Human Rights Code.
II. Sex Workers Rights: The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, SC 2014, c 25 [PCEPA] was introduced in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2013 decision in Bedford v Canada, where the Court found that three Criminal Code provisions which criminalized components of sex work unjustifiably violated section 7 of the Charter and struck them down. The PCEPA includes new provisions that criminalize the purchase of sexual services in Canada and other related activities such as advertising the sale of sexual services. Sex worker organizations and constitutional experts believe that these new provisions remain unconstitutional because many of the harms identified in Bedford continue to be perpetuated. The continuation of these harms under a new legal context means that a new constitutional analysis is necessary. This working group will develop a comprehensive memo that provides information that could assist in a constitutional challenge of the post-Bedford sex work laws by key sex-worker organizations in Canada.
III. Refugee and Immigration Law: Recently, there have been incidents in which CBSA (Canadian Border Services Agency) officers have randomly conducted street checks in minority-populated Toronto neighbourhoods. In light of the United States ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and immigration camps, these events are extremely concerning. Thus, HALCO (the HIV/AIDS Legal Aid Clinic of Ontario) is looking to collaborate with our longstanding Refugee and Immigration working group to create a plain-language public legal information brochure detailing the powers of a CBSA agent and an individual’s rights when interacting with them. The working group will research and develop the brochure under the supervision of a staff immigration lawyer at HALCO.
IV. Climate Justice: November 18th, 2019 is ‘Student Law Clinic Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.’ The event organizers (GAJE, the Global Alliance for Justice Education) have asked participating student legal clinics to choose a project related to air pollution and complete it by or on November 18th to mark the date. This student working group will prepare an opinion piece on the Ontario government’s potential constitutional obligations with respect to regulating air pollution in Chemical Valley. The OpEd will urge the provincial government to honour its commitment to evaluating the impact of the new regulations in the winter of 2019-2020, and to recognize the role it can and should play in protecting environmental rights. In the second term, the group will have the opportunity to brainstorm and work together on another climate justice/constitutional law related project.

Learn more at O-week Clubs Fair (September 5th) and at the Information & Sign Up session on Tuesday September 10, 2019 at 12:30 in J250 (Moot Court).
PLEASE NOTE: to be eligible to sign up for one of the above working groups, you must attend the September 10th Information & Sign-up Session.

For more information, please email: tal.schreier@utoronto.ca

WEBINAR: COVID-19 Contact Tracing and the Canadian Constitution
2020-07-29 12:00 - 13:30
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights & the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society were pleased to co-present
COVID-19 Contact Tracing and the Canadian Constitution
a FREE WEBINAR on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:00-1:30pm
Contact tracing apps play an important role alongside human tracing in our public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to ensure that contact tracing apps infringe our Constitutional rights as little as possible, however, the apps must be carefully constructed and the information they collect must be safeguarded. In a highly collaborative research paper entitled “Test, Trace, and Isolate: COVID-19 and the Canadian Constitution,” a team of experts from the University of Toronto, York University and the Ontario Tech University reviewed the benefits and limitations of using contact tracing apps to identify people who have been exposed to COVID-19.
In this webinar, the paper’s authors Lisa Austin (pictured), Vincent Chiao, David Lie (pictured), and Andrea Slane took part in a group discussion, led by Asper Centre Executive Director Cheryl Milne, about their research and conclusions including: the usefulness of contact tracing apps, the privacy choices involved in the technical design of these apps, which app the government has selected to use and why, as well as the privacy impacts considered under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which provides a framework for balancing competing rights and interests.
The panelists will be available for questions at the end of their discussion. An electronic copy of the paper is available here. Email tal.schreier@utoronto.ca for inquiries.
WEBINAR RECORDING LINK
Authors’ BIOS
Lisa Austin BA &Sc (McMaster) 1994, MA (Toronto) 1995, LLM (Toronto) (1998), PhD (Toronto) 2005, called to the Bar of Ontario in 2006, is a Professor of Law and the Chair in Law and Technology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is a co-founder of the IT3 Law at the University of Toronto, which engages in interdisciplinary research on privacy and transparency. Professor Austin’s research and teaching interests include privacy law, property law, and legal theory. She is published in such journals as Legal Theory, Law and Philosophy, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and Canadian Journal of Law and Society. Professor Austin’s privacy work has been cited numerous times by Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada.
Vincent Chiao, B.A. (University of Virginia), Ph.D. (Northwestern), J.D. (Harvard), is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto. He researches and teaches primarily in the area of criminal law and criminal justice, with a particular interest in the philosophical examination of its doctrine and institutions. He is the author of Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (Oxford University Press 2018). He is also responsible for overseeing the Faculty of Law’s appellate criminal law externship, which provides selected third year JD students with the opportunity to work directly on criminal appeals, including before the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Dr. Beth Coleman is Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform lab. Working in the disciplines of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Race Theory, her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. She is the author of Hello Avatar and multiple articles addressing issues of smart cities, urban data, augmentation & experience design, and critical race, among others. She has presented at leading international conferences and municipal contexts such as CHI; Sharing Cities, Barcelona; Gender and Cities, Geneva; Mars/Waterfront Toronto. Her research affiliations include the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University; Microsoft Research; Data & Society Institute, New York; and expert consultant for the European Commission Digital Futures. She is one of the foundational directors of Thriving Cities, Mistletoe Singapore. Her previous academic positions include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Waterloo.
David Lie received his BASc from the University of Toronto in 1998, and his MS and PhD from Stanford University in 2001 and 2004 respectively. He is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.  He also holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Faculty of Law and is a research lead with the Schwartz Riesman Institute for Technology and Society.  He is known for his seminal work on the XOM architecture, which was an early precursor to modern trusted execution processor architectures such as ARM Trustzone and Intel SGX.  He was the recipient of a best paper award at SOSP for this work. David is also a recipient of the MRI Early Researcher Award, Connaught Global Challenge Award.  He developed the PScout Android Permission mapping tool, whose datasets have been downloaded over 10,000 times and used in dozens of subsequent papers.  David has served on various program committees including OSDI, Usenix Security, IEEE Security & Privacy, NDSS and CCS.  Currently, his interests are focused on securing mobile platforms, cloud computing security and bridging the divide between technology and policy.
Martha Shaffer is a Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, which she joined in 1990. She holds law degrees from Harvard and Toronto, as well as an undergraduate degree from Harvard. She served as Law Clerk to the Supreme Court of Canada for Chief Justice Brian Dickson, before becoming the Boulton Junior Fellow at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. Professor Shaffer’s principal research and teaching interests concentrate on criminal law, family law and equality issues.
Dr. Andrea Slane joined Ontario Tech University’s Faculty of Social Science and Humanities in 2009 as an Associate Professor in the Legal Studies program. She is also the Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Programs, Legal Studies. Her research focuses on privacy, data protection, and the variety of legal regimes that protect people from both individual and commercial wrongdoing online and over digital devices. She has a substantial body of work on the appropriate means to regulate the flow of personal information, whether between individuals; individuals and businesses; businesses and government; business to business; or to the public. She has also conducted sociological research on the views of professionals who work with victims of online child sexual exploitation, and is currently engaged in a new project examining senior citizens’ views toward new social support technologies such as digital assistants and social robots, and the kinds of protections they feel they need.
François Tanguay-Renaud is a Professor of Law and the Director of York University’s Jack & Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security since 2012. He is also one of the founders and first Director of York’ University’s Juris Doctor/Master of Arts (JD/MA) combined program in law and philosophy, the founder and main administrator of the Ontario Legal Philosophy Partnership (OLPP) and a former Associate Dean Research, Graduate Studies, and Institutional Relations. Professor Tanguay-Renaud holds degrees in both civil and common law from McGill University, where he was both a Loran Scholar and a Greville-Smith Scholar. He also studied at the National University of Singapore, and completed his graduate work (BCL, MPhil, DPhil) at the University of Oxford. Professor Tanguay-Renaud ‘s current academic interests span a wide range of subject areas — but notably, criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, emergency law, and public international law — viewed mostly through the lens of analytical legal theory.

Student Working Groups Information Session (for U of T Law JD students)
2022-09-13 12:30 - 14:00 | J250 Jackman Law Building
Dear U of T Law JD students,
Please attend this important lunchtime Information session on September 13, 2022 to find out about the volunteer opportunities available this year at the Asper Centre and the IHRP. Lunch will be provided!
Please check our student working group page to learn more about the public interest programs’ joint volunteer recruitment process guidelines (which will be available soon) for more details about how to get involved with our programs.
We look forward to meeting and working with you!
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights
The Asper Centre is devoted to advocacy, research, and education in constitutional law in Canada. The cornerstone of the Centre is a legal clinic that brings together upper year students, faculty, and members of the bar to work on significant constitutional cases and advocacy initiatives for credit.
Students in all years can volunteer with one of the Asper Centre’s student working groups led by upper year students. Working groups prepare policy briefs, draft public legal information materials, organize workshops, and/or conduct research on current or emerging constitutional law and Charter rights issues. This year, the Asper Centre is pleased to support the following working groups: i) Climate Justice; ii) Consent, Sexual Assault, and Constitutional Rights; iii) Prisoners’ Rights Handbook; iv) Police Oversight; and v) Reproductive Rights.
The International Human Rights Program
The IHRP involves law students in international human rights law advocacy, knowledge exchange, and capacity-building. IHRP working groups are student-led projects that provide experiential learning opportunities in several areas of international law. The groups are led by upper year law students and are supervised and supported by the IHRP Director and Research Associates. This year, the IHRP has 5 working groups: Women’s Human Rights Resources, Global Health and Human Rights, Cameroon Anglophone Crisis Database of Atrocities, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and the Venezuela Accountability Project.

Charter @ 40 Webinar
2022-10-21 12:00 - 14:00 | Online Zoom Webinar
Forty years ago, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted with the signing of the Proclamation of the Constitution Act, 1982. The Charter protects the rights and freedoms of all Canadians and is built on the shared values of equality, justice and freedom. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which recognizes and affirms Indigenous and Treaty rights of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.
On October 21, 2022 at noon, please join us for a stimulating discussion (via Zoom Webinar), hosted by the Asper Centre’s Executive Director Cheryl Milne, who will be joined by 9 of the Centre’s past Constitutional Litigators in Residence, for a reflection on the Charter’s anniversary – how far have we come in the last 40 years to uphold the Charter’s rights and values and what we can hope for in the next 40 years?
The following esteemed guests will take part in this special conversation:

Raj Anand
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2015
Senior partner at Weir Foulds LLP, focused on litigation, administrative and human rights law. Former Chief Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and Bencher for the Law Society of Ontario.
Justice Breese Davies
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2017
Appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2018. Prior to her appointment, she maintained a criminal, constitutional, and human rights law practice.
Mary Eberts
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2014
Canadian constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate. Recipient of Order of Canada. Influential in creation of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and founding member of Women’s Legal Action and Education Fund (LEAF).
Nader Hasan
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2020
Partner at Stockwood LLP, Nader practises criminal, regulatory and constitutional law at the trial and appellate levels.
Janet E. Minor
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2016
Former General Counsel in the Constitutional Law Branch of the Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario and former Treasurer of the Law Society of Ontario.
Justice John Norris
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2013
Appointed to the Federal Court of Canada in 2018. Prior to his appointment, he maintained a trial and appellate practice in the areas of criminal, constitutional and national security.
Jessica Orkin
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2022
Partner at Goldblatt Partners, with a broad litigation practice including criminal, civil and administrative law matters, with an emphasis on constitutional rights, human rights, and Aboriginal rights.
Jonathan Rudin
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2021
Program Director and senior lawyer at Aboriginal Legal Services, Jonathan has written and spoken widely on issues of Indigenous justice.
Susan Ursel
Constitutional Litigator-in-Residence, 2018
Senior partner with the law firm of Ursel Phillips Fellows Hopkinson LLP. Labour and human rights lawyer and frequent speaker, teacher and writer on human rights and Charter issues.

Register for this virtual event at charterat40.eventbrite.com
All welcome!

IHRP & Asper Centre book forum with Ninette Kelly - People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge
2022-10-28 12:00 - 15:00 | J140 Jackman Law Building, 78 Queen's Park Cres, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C5, Canada
REGISTER
Book Forum hosted by the International Human Rights Program and the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights

Friday, October 28, 2022 – 12:00pm to 3:00pm (light lunch served for those in person, at noon; program starting at 12:30pm)
Jackman Law Building, J140 or virtual

People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge (Oxford University Press 2022) by Ninette Kelley
Program

Words of welcome from Dean Jutta Brunnée
Book overview by Ninette Kelley

Commentators

Erin Simpson (JD 2013)
IHRP alumna, founding partner of Landings LLP, practicing refugee and immigration law in Toronto
Professor Yin-Yuan Chen (MSW 2005, JD 2010, SJD 2020)
IHRP and Asper Centre alumnus, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Common Law section), researching refugees’ access to health care
Professor Ghizaal Haress
Visiting Scholar and Scholar-at-Risk, University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy
Fen Hampson (attending virtually)
President, World Refugee and Migration Council

Response by Author
Ninette Kelley is a former senior officer in UNHCR. She recently completed a book for UNHCR to commemorate the 70th anniversaries of the creation of the Office (2020) and of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (2021). People Forced to Flee: History, Change and Challenge (Oxford University Press, 2022). It reflects back and looks forward: drawing on the lessons of history to probe how we can improve responses to forced displacement. Prior assignments included UNHCR Director, New York (2015-2019) and UNHCR Representative, Lebanon (2010-2015).
Kelley has also held various policy and consultative roles with international humanitarian agencies focusing on development, immigration and refugee issues. In Canada she served eight years on the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). She is the author of The Making of the Mosaic: The History of Canadian Immigration Policy, University of Toronto Press, 2nd edition, October 2010 (with Michael Trebilcock) and has published in the areas of human rights law, citizenship, refugee protection, gender related persecution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. She is a lawyer by training.

REGISTER

Constitutional Roundtable with Professor Dwight Newman
2023-10-03 12:30 - 14:00 | Flavelle FL219 – John Willis Classroom
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights’ Constitutional Roundtables are an annual series of lunchtime discussion forums that provide an opportunity to consider developments in Canadian constitutional theory and practice. The Constitutional Roundtable series promotes scholarship and aims to make a meaningful contribution to intellectual discourse about Canadian constitutional law.
Professor Dwight Newman presented the following paper (click link):
Between Individuality and Sociality in the Charter: Reengaging the Significance of the Section 2(b) Freedom of Thought and Section 2(d) Freedom of Association
Tuesday, October 3, 2023 – 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location: FL219 John Willis Classroom, Flavelle House, Faculty of Law
Abstract “This paper bridges some of my recent and ongoing work on freedom of thought, freedom of association, and, more generally, what I have called the ‘forgotten freedoms’ (those section 2 freedoms that have been underdeveloped in scholarship and jurisprudence relative to others), connecting to a broader theme in my work that many rights instruments are less individualistic than they first appear and instead involve a complex mediation of individuality and sociality. In the paper, I make an argument for the significance of the underdeveloped section 2(b) freedom of thought provision, showing how the history of human rights instruments, emerging international discussion of freedom of thought, and emerging contemporary challenges(including a brief romp through some particular issues from AI) can help to highlight the relevance and potential paths forward for the provision. In doing so, I contest doctrinal arguments by the likes of Peter Hogg and philosophical arguments by Fred Schauerthat would challenge the appropriateness of regarding freedom of thought as an independent freedom, and I claim that associated path dependence has resulted in a misshaping of Charter interpretation. This underdeveloped individual freedom, protecting the forum internum, sits textually alongside an underdeveloped social freedom, the section 2(d) freedom of association. On section 2(d), I will argue that Canadian case law that has developed section 2(d) principally in the context of labour unions has similarly missed the underlying philosophical richness of the provision, with path dependence in litigation power dynamics contributing to a provision failing to be developed across the full range of its appropriate applications (something highlighted in problems arising amid recent events associated with COVID-19 and its aftermath). On my argument, the careful balance of freedoms within the Charter and the individual-social axis within the Charter have faced distortion within the limited parameters of Canadian judicial and scholarly engagement with the Charter, with judicial engagement understandably hemmed in by what is litigated and scholarly engagement unnecessarily limited but potentially more open to new imaginative endeavours that can seek to reengage the full potential of the Charter.”

Dwight Newman, KC is an academic visitor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in September-October 2023 and will be Professeur invité at the Faculté de droit of l’Université Laval in November 2023. Normally, he is Professor of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, where he has been on faculty since 2005, and where he has also served a term as Associate Dean Academic and a 2013-2023 term in a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law. He has over 200 publications of various types, including 15 books. His writing is regularly cited as an authority in judicial decisions in Indigenous rights and constitutional law cases. He has been a fellow or visitor at Cambridge, Oxford, McGill, Princeton, l’Université de Montréal, and the University of Western Australia (UWA). He is a member of the bars of Ontario and Saskatchewan and maintains a small part-time constitutional law practice. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer and Justice Louis LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada and has also worked for Justice Canada and for human rights organizations in Hong Kong and South Africa. His initial studies were in his home province of Saskatchewan (BA in Economics at Regina and JD at Saskatchewan), and he completed his legal graduate studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (BCL, MPhil, DPhil). He recently completed two additional graduate degrees that deepen his interdisciplinary understandings and sense on the social place of law (MATS in History of Christianity and MSc in Finance and Financial Law). He has served in various board or committee roles, including at different times as Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Rights of Indigenous Peoples Interest Group, member of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, voting member of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) national council, Vice-President of the Canadian Law and Society Association, and member of the boards of organizations involved in public interest litigation (Advocates for the Rule of Law and the Canadian Constitution Foundation). He also has a longstanding role as a volunteer judge for the international rounds of the Jessup International Law Moot.
