David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights
Presents
A Discussion on the Role of Interveners in Public Interest Litigation
Nathalie Des Rosiers and Kent Roach
March 24, 2009
12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Flavelle House, Room FLB
A light lunch will be served.
The Asper Centre welcomes Nathalie Des Rosiers as she is about to take on the new role of General Counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association upon the retirement of Alan Borovoy. She will be discussing the development of interventions as an empowerment tool for civil society and citizens in important public interest cases. Professor Roach of the Faculty of Law will provide a critique of the role of interveners as court parties and discuss effective models of public interest interventions. This workshop commences activities that the Asper Centre will be undertaking over the next year on this vital aspect of public interest advocacy including a working paper series and a fall symposium.
Kent Roach is Prichard-Wilson Chair of Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, with cross-appointments in criminology and political science, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and of Yale, and a former law clerk to Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada. In addition to his extensive scholarship, he has served on the research advisory committee for a number of public inquiries including the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, the Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182 and the Ipperwash Inquiry into the killing of Dudley George. He has represented Aboriginal and civil liberties groups in many interventions before the courts, including in the landmark Supreme Court of Canada cases of Stillman, Latimer, Gladue and Sauve.
Nathalie Des Rosiers has been appointed the next General Counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) effective July 1, 2009. She is currently Acting Vice-President – governance of the University of Ottawa. She was Dean of the Civil Law Section of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law until November 2008. She is a graduate of the Université de Montréal Harvard University in 1984, and has an honorary doctorate from the Law Society of Upper Canada. Professor Des Rosiers was president of the Law Commission of Canada from 2000 to 2004. She served as law clerk to Supreme Court of Canada Justice Julien Chouinard from 1982 to 1983. She is the current President of the Canadian Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities, has been president of the Association des juristes d’expression française de l’Ontario and of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers.
Please RSVP to Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
