Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella will give the Robert P. Anderson Memorial Fellowship Lecture, "A Justice Journey: Developing a Culture of Rights," on Monday, October 11, 2004, at 4:30 p.m., in Room 127. The talk is free and open to the public.
Justice Abella has served on the bench for over thirty years and was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in August 2004.
After graduating from the University of Toronto Law School in 1970, she practiced civil and criminal litigation until, at the age of 29, she was appointed to the Ontario Family Court in 1976, making her Canada's youngest (and first pregnant) person to be appointed to the Bench. She chaired the Ontario Labor Relations Board, the Ontario Law Reform Commission, and the Study on Access to Legal Services by the Disabled. She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992 and raised to the Supreme Court of Canada on August 30, 2004.
She was sole Commissioner and author of the 1984 federal Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, in which she created the term and concept of "employment equity", a new strategy for reducing barriers in employment faced by women, aboriginal people, non-whites, and persons with disabilities. The theories of "equality" and "discrimination" she developed in her Report were adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada in its first decision dealing with equality rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Report has been implemented by the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa.
She has written over 70 articles and written or co-edited 4 books on a variety of legal topics. She lectures extensively in Canada and internationally. Justice Abella is a specially elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Senior Fellow at Massey College. She has 20 honorary degrees, and is the only woman to receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Justice Abella was awarded the 2003 International Justice Prize of the Peter Grube Foundation and the 2004 Walter S. Tarnopolsky Award for Human Rights by the Canadian Bar Association and the International Commission of Jurists, and was selected as the 2004-2005 Robert Anderson Fellow at Yale Law School.
Justice Abella was born on July 1, 1946 in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany and came to Canada as a refugee in 1950. She is married to Canadian history professor Iving Abella and they have two sons, Jacob and Zachary, both lawyers.