Angela Fernandez is an Associate Professor (Tenured) at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, where she has been teaching since 2004. She completed her LL.M. (2002) and J.S.D. (2007) at the Yale Law School. Her LL.B. and B.C.L. are from McGill University, where she graduated from the National Program in 2000. She clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada, for former Justice Michel Bastarache, in 2000-2001.
Professor Fernandez’s primary research area is legal history. Her projects have focused on the history of legal education (the Litchfield Law School and the case method of teaching); case-in-context-studies (Pierson v. Post); important “first” lawyers (the first American lawyer in 17th Century Massachusetts, Thomas Lechford, and the first woman lawyer to sit on the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada, Bertha Wilson); law libraries (the private library of Quebec lawyer, judge, and law teacher, Albert Mayrand); law firm history (Wilson’s time in practice at Osler, Hoskin, Harcourt in Toronto and the record-keeping practices she instituted there); and the history of the legal treatise (Tapping Reeve’s 1816 work, Baron and Femme). Much of her work deals with biography, record-keeping, the legal profession, and women and the law. Her research and writing seeks to address the important issue of how legal culture is constituted and then reproduces itself over time through familiar-to-hand mechanisms like the canonized cases in the law school curriculum, our stories of great “firsts” in the profession, and what gets crystallized in law books and other forms of legal literature. She has presented her work as a fellow at the Hurst Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin in 2005, as a participant in the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum at Stanford University in May 2007, and at various legal history workshops, including the Legal History Workshop at Tel Aviv University in May 2010, the American Bar Foundation/Illinois Legal History Seminar in April 2011, the American Society for Legal History in November 2011 and the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society in December 2011.
Professor Fernandez has recently completed editing a collection of essays with Markus D. Dubber, Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise (Oxford; Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing). She is an editor and contributor to a Focus Feature in the University of Toronto Law Journal "Foxes, Seals, Whales and the Rule of Capture: Animals in the Law and Legal History." She is writing a book on the famous fox case Pierson v. Post (manuscript under contract with Cambridge University Press).
In addition to teachiing Contracts in the first-year curriculum, Professor Fernandez teaches upper-year courses in legal history. "Canadian Approaches to International Law," designed and taught with Professor Karen Knop in 2005-07, is featured on the Canadian Council on International Law web site, together with a selection of student papers from the course. "Legal Archaeology: Studies in Cases in Context" was last taught in the fall of 2011. History and Theory of the Common Law," a new course, was co-taught with Professor Lisa Austin in the Fall of 2012 and will be taught again in the Fall of 2013.
