Critical Conversations in Canadian Public Law

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.

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. Her research and publications focus on human rights and public interest litigation. 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.

Sealy-Harrington 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 is a Trinidadian-Canadian born in Calgary, Alberta.

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.