Constitutional Roundtable with Prof Margot Young

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.

We are pleased to be hosting Professor Margot Young (Peter A. Allard School of Law, UBC) for a Constitutional Roundatble on January 14, 2025, about her book chapter in our recent publication Litigating Equality (Lexis Nexis, 2023). The presentation and book chapter is titled: Zombie Concepts: Contagion in Canadian Equality Law.

ABSTRACT: Jurisprudence under section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has not forged an easy or seemingly consistent path. The most recent decision about equality from the Supreme Court of Canada, R v Sharma, is illustration of this assertion. Here, the equality harm the claimant, an Indigenous woman, faces could not be starker: a toxic mix of racism, sexism, and the legacy of settler colonialism. Yet, the majority judgment finds no evidence of discriminatory harm. While claiming adhenrence to past doctrinal formulations, this judgment recasts significantly recent tests for section 15, scaffolding their rejection of the equality claim with much criticized and, in many instances, disavowed concepts from equality law’s history. These are the zombie concepts of equality thought: causation, arbitrariness and negative obligation. The metaphor of the zombie highlights the continual dismissal and then resurrection of these notions as markers of a deep judicial anxiety stalking equality rights law. The repeat appearance of thee somnambulist concepts reveals another haunting – the transformative promise of substantive equality is itself spoiled by judicial anxieties around both social change and institutional role.

BIO:  Margot Young is Professor in the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. After studying at the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, and the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Young began her teaching career at the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria.  In 2002, she moved to the University of British Columbia.

Professor Young teaches in the areas of constitutional and social justice law.  She was the Director of the Social Justice Specialization at the law school and has organized the Law and Society Speakers Series for close to a decade.  Professor Young served three terms as Chair of the university-wide Faculty Association Status of Women Committee.  She is a research associate with Green College, the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Centre for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC.

Professor Young’s research interests focus on equality law and theory, women’s economic equality, urban theory, and local housing politics and rights.  She is also working on the intersections between environmental justice, social justice, feminism, and human rights.  Professor Young was co-editor of the collection Poverty: Rights, Social Citizenship and Legal Activism and was Co-Principal Investigator of the Housing Justice Project (HousingJustice.ca).  She is widely published in a variety of journals and edited books.

Professor Young is a member of the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Women and Law, the Review of Constitutional Studies, Studies in Housing Law and is on the advisory board of the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice. In 2016, she became co-editorship of the Law and Society Review.

Professor Young is active in a variety of professional and community organizations.  She sits on the boards for Justice for Girls and the David Suzuki Foundation.  She is Research Associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-BC Office.  Professor Young works with provincial and national women’s equality groups during United Nation committees’ periodic reviews of Canada’s human rights record, travelling as an NGO representative to these meetings in New York and Geneva.  More specifically, she works with the BC CEDAW Group and the Feminist Alliance for International Action.

Professor Young is a frequent commentator in the media on a variety of issues to do with social justice and socio-economic rights issues.  Interviews include local, national, and international print, television, and radio coverage of key constitutional, equality, and civil liberties issues.

All are welcome * No RSVP Required * Light lunch provided