Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law (Paperback)

Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law is a groundbreaking open-access collection of peer-reviewed essays showcasing interdisciplinary thinking on topical public law issues at the forefront of the evolving relationship between state and society.

In Canada, this relationship is undergoing a period of significant reinvention, as evidenced, for example, by the movements for reconciliation, decolonization and Indigenization, the calls to recognize and remedy systemic racism in institutions including police forces, and the recent extension of human rights protections to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or expression.

These examples reveal that we are experiencing a moment where claims that challenge the normative foundations of the discipline of public law are being made in real time; claims about citizenship, rights, and access to resources and benefits; claims about what substantive and procedural fairness look like, and for whom; claims about the obligations and limits of the state to proactively address both historical and current injustices; and challenges to the underlying assumptions about the state itself.

Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law highlights the intersections of critical perspectives–including intersectional approaches to decolonial and Indigenous legal theory, Indigenous constitutionalisms, critical race theory, feminisms, queer theory and critical disability theory–and public law topics, broadly defined.

This collection bridges the divide between traditional, largely liberal, public law scholarship and critical perspectives by centring critical theories as not only relevant, but imperative, to robust, fully contextualized understandings of contemporary public law challenges.

Yin-Yuan Chen (Contributor)
Yin-Yuan Chen is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.

Allison Christians (Contributor)
Allison Christians is Full Professor and the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in the Law of Taxation at McGill University Faculty of Law.

Gordon Christie (Contributor)
Gordon Christie is Professor Emeritus at Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia.

Lorena Fontaine (Contributor)
Lorena Fontaine is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba.

Véronique Fortin (Contributor)
Véronique Fortin is Full Professor in the Faculty of Law at Université de Sherbrooke.

Lisa M. Kelly (Contributor)
Lisa M. Kelly is an Associate Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law.

Harry Laforme (Contributor)
Harry S. LaForme, Anishinaabe, part of the Eagle Clan and a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in southern Ontario. He is a 1977 graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School and the past chair of several royal commissions. In 1994, he was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice, and in 2004, he was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal, where he presided until 2018 as the first Indigenous person to sit on appellate court in Canada. He is currently senior counsel with the law firm Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP.

Ravi Malhotra (Contributor)
Ravi Malhotra is Full Professor in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section at the University of Ottawa.

Meenakshi Mannoe (Contributor)
Meenakshi Mannoe (she/her/hers) is a criminalization and policing campaigner at Pivot Legal Society.

Mona Paré (Contributor)
Mona Paré is Full Professor in the Facullty of Law, Civil Law Section, at the University of Ottawa and Director, Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child (IRLRC).

Dayna Scott (Contributor)
Dayna Scott is Professor at York University and York Research Chair in Environmental Law & Justice in the Green Economy.

Samuel Singer (Contributor)
Samuel Singer is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa.

Kerry Sloan (Contributor)
Kerry Sloan is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University.

Reakash Walters (Contributor)
Reakash Walters is a Canadian lawyer and doctoral candidate at Berkeley School of Law.

Vincent Wong (Contributor)
Vincent Wong is Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.

Joao Velloso (Contributor)
João Velloso has a multidisciplinary background in law, criminology, sociology, anthropology, and communication. He works in the areas of criminal law and sentencing, critical criminology, and socio-legal studies, more particularly sociology and anthropology of law. His empirical research deals with the penalization of protesters and migrants (deportation and detention), access to justice in detention, and the regulation of cannabis. Professor Velloso is a member of the University of Ottawa Human Rights Research and Education Centre and participates in different Canadian and international research networks and projects.

Karen Drake (Editor)
Karen Drake is Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, at York University.

She is a member of the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation who researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian law as it affects Indigenous peoples, Anishinaabe constitutionalism, Indigenous pedagogy within legal education, property law, and dispute resolution including civil procedure and Indigenous dispute resolution. She joined the Osgoode faculty in July 2017 from the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University where she had been a founding Co-Editor in Chief of the Lakehead Law Journal.

Prior to joining Lakehead, she articled with Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, completed clerkships with the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Federal Court, and practised with Erickson & Partners, focusing on legal issues impacting Indigenous peoples, human rights, and civil litigation.

Kyle Kirkup (Editor)
Kyle Kirkup is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Common Law Section). His research explores the role of constitutional law, criminal law, and family law in regulating contemporary norms of gender identity and sexuality.

Professor Kirkup holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (SJD 2017), where he was a 2013 Trudeau Scholar and a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar. He also studied at Yale Law School (LLM 2012), the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (JD 2009), and the College of the Humanities at Carleton University (BHum 2006).


In 2010-2011, Professor Kirkup served as a law clerk to the Honourable Madam Justice Louise Charron at the Supreme Court of Canada. He also taught advanced constitutional law in the Faculty of Law at Western University and worked at McCarthy Tétrault LLP in Toronto. He was called to the Bar of Ontario in 2010.

Anne Levesque (Editor)
Anne Levesque is Associate Professor in the French Common Law Program at the University of Ottawa. Her research and her publications focus on human rights and public interest litigation. Anne has practiced in the areas of employment, human rights, and public interest law. She has worked with a wide range of equality seeking groups, legal clinics, and non-for-profit organisations on test case litigation, interventions, and law reform initiatives.

She studied history and political science before obtaining her law degree from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (French Common Law Program) in 2007, followed by a Master's degree in International Human Rights from Oxford University in 2016. She is one of the lawyers representing the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada pro bono in its human rights complaint leading to a landmark victory in 2016 that affirms the right to equality of over 165,000 First Nations children.

Jena McGill (Editor)
Jena McGill is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section), and a member of the Law Society of Ontario. Her research engages with areas of Canadian constitutional law (with a focus on equality law); gender and sexuality; women, peace and security in international law; intersectional feminist legal theory; and legal technology as a vehicle to promote access to justice. Her work on section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada. Jena has been a Visiting Scholar at the Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality at Kent Law School in Canterbury, UK.

Joshua Sealy-Harrington (Editor)
Joshua Sealy-Harrington is Associate Professor and Chair of Equality Law at Windsor Law where he teaches and researches about constitutional law (with a focus on equality law), critical legal theory, and social change.

Further, as Counsel at Power Law, Sealy-Harrington’s advocacy strategically mobilizes criminal and constitutional law to advance the interests of marginalized communities.

He practices remotely from New York City, where he conducts doctoral research at Columbia Law School theorizing law, identity, and sexuality. He previously completed an LL.M. at Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Fulbright Student, and Law Society Viscount Bennet Scholar.

He has authored several peer-reviewed publications as well as articles for The Globe and Mail, Newsweek, National Magazine, Law Matters, and ABlawg. Further, his scholarship has been cited by the Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court of Canada. He is passionate about translating the experience of minority groups into tangible legal claims. And in 2019, he received a Canadian Law Blog Award for his online advocacy on behalf of race, gender, and sexual minorities.