Thursday, March 25, 2021

Prasanna Balasundaram

The Faculty of Law has announced the appointment of Prasanna Balasundaram as Director, Downtown Legal Services, the Faculty's community legal clinic and clinical education program.

Prasanna has spent the past seven years as a DLS staff lawyer with oversight over the clinic’s refugee and immigration division. He is well-known as an excellent litigator with notable successes with law reform/test case litigation, including constitutional challenges to the Designated Country of Origin regime, the Safe Third Country Agreement and interventions. Prasanna is also a very popular clinical educator and supervisor who has supported, evaluated and reviewed case work for countless students over the past several years.

U of T News: How U of T's Downtown Legal Services helped refugees strike down the Safe Third Country Agreement in a federal court

Prasanna’s past and current volunteer commitments include leadership roles with the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, the Alliance for South Asian Aids Prevention and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.

Prasanna earned an LLM from the London School of Economics (2008), a JD from Osgoode Hall Law School (2006) and a BA from Queen’s University (2003).

The Faculty thanks DLS staff lawyer Karen Bellinger for generously serving as Acting Director since August 2020.