Parker was a student in Dr. Michelle Gallant’s Philanthropy and the Law course, which examines philanthropy and the origins and regulation of charities. He explained his inspiration to write the paper (apart from the course requirement) stemmed from his fascination with the intersection between law and economics. “Human behaviour is shaped by both structure and agency; analyzing how structural factors—like law and culture—influence material conditions is vital when studying philanthropy,” he said. “Charity can be done in many ways, so a jurisdictional analysis of variable charitable approaches seemed pragmatic insofar as it might point to potential areas for improvement within our own charitable framework.”

While Gallant’s course was fundamental to growing his interest in this area of law, entering the essay contest offered more opportunity to gain experience and exposure within the field. “This field does work which is fundamental to the wellbeing of our community, and expanding discourse within this domain is of paramount importance,” Parker said.

Honoured to learn of his entry’s selection as the winning paper, Parker said, “I want to extend my thanks to the Canadian Bar Association’s Charity and Not-for-Profit Law section, the community here at Robson Hall, and especially Dr. Gallant for making this opportunity possible. The CBA has myriad possibilities for students to submit research and expand scholarship within various fields of law, and I would encourage all of my peers to consider doing so.”

The CBA’s Charities and Not-for-Profit Law section had established its law student essay contest to promote and reward interest in charity and not-for-profit law topics in Canadian law schools and to promote participation by law students in the sector. Gallant credits Robson Hall alum Florence Carey [LLB/00], a past president of the CBA Charities section, with bringing the contest to the Faculty’s attention years ago.

The award is presented annually for the best English or French scholarly paper received by the submission date on a subject relating to Canadian charity and not-for-profit law, by a full-time law student.

The deadline for submissions for 2026 is April 26^th. In addition to a $500 prize, the winning student is invited to attend the annual Charity Law Symposium.

Past University of Manitoba winners and links to their respective winning papers are as follows:

• 2023 – Robert Johnstone [JD/23] (Corporate / Commercial lawyer at MLT Aikins LLP) Winning paper: “The Secularization of Philanthropy: Examining the Potential Revocation of the Roman Catholic Church’s Charitable Status.”
• 2022 –Alexander Barnes [JD/22] (Associate at Thorsteinssons LLP Tax Lawyers).
  Winning paper: “Modernizing the Definition of Charity in Canada.”
• 2020 –Reid Buchanan [JD/21] (Legal Counsel at People Corporation Canada).
  Winning paper: “Charitable Donation Tax Credits in Canada: Equitable Concerns and Options for Reform.”
• 2019 –Daniel Giles [JD/20] (Associate lawyer at Fillmore Riley LLP).
  Winning paper: “Granting Charitable Status to Journalism.”

Civil forfeiture regimes that allow governments to seize citizens’ assets, along with unexplained wealth orders — a type of court order that requires people to explain to a judge how they acquired funds — are often described as essential weapons in the battle against money laundering and profitable criminal activity, most notably illegal drug trafficking.

British Columbia’s 2023 embrace of unexplained wealth orders was accompanied by several references to cracking down on organized crime.

Robert Johnstone (3L) won the 2023 CBA Charities and Not-for-Profit Law Section’s student essay-writing contest.

Johnstone is part of the L. Kerry Vickar Business Law Clinic and serves as an assistant editor of the Banking and Finance Law Review. Johnstone worked as a summer law student at MLT Aikins LLP. He wrote the winning essay after taking Professor Michelle Gallant’s course Philanthropy and the Law which examines philanthropy and the origins and regulation of charities. The course considers the ethics of giving, tax governance, the legal meaning of ‘charity,’ fund-raising, terrorism and non-for profits.

“It’s an honor to have my essay selected for this award,” said Johnstone. “Thank you to my family and friends, all of whom have supported me on this academic journey.”

“Dr. Gallant’s course provided the perfect opportunity to draft a piece on something that I see as very important in the future in tax and the way it affects the most vulnerable in society,” he said.

Reflecting on the area of law, Johnstone said, “Philanthropy isn’t just about the allocation of resources, but also includes examining the best method for their delivery. The Catholic Church, and how it impacts Canadian society from a charitable perspective, provided an interesting case study.”

The CBA’s Charities and Not-for-Profit Law section had established its law student essay contest to promote and reward interest in charity and not-for-profit law topics in Canadian law schools and to promote participation by law students in the sector.

The award is presented annually for the best English or French scholarly paper received by the submission date on a subject relating to Canadian charity and not-for-profit law, by a full-time law student.

The deadline for submission each year is May 2 and in addition to a $500 prize, the winning student is invited to attend the annual Charity Law Symposium.

Past University of Manitoba winners and links to their respective winning papers are as follows:

• 2022 –Alexander Barnes [JD/2022] (Clerked at the Tax Court of Canada and is now Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice Canada).
  Winning Paper: “Modernizing the Definition of Charity in Canada.”

• 2020 –Reid Buchanan [JD/2021] (Legal Counsel at People Corporation).
  Winning Paper: “Charitable Donation Tax Credits in Canada: Equitable Concerns and Options for Reform.”

• 2019 –Daniel Giles [JD/2020] (Associate lawyer at Fillmore Riley on the commercial team in the firm’s business practice).
  Winning Paper: “Granting Charitable Status to Journalism.”

Impressed with the volume of work Torrie has produced over so short a period of time, Gallant said, “It is a little unusual for a relatively nascent scholar to mine corporate history and offer a different take on bankruptcy law.  Her solo-authored text does that and has been extremely well-received by her much more senior peers.”

Case in point, Torrie’s major achievement of 2020 was the publication of her first book mentioned above, Reinventing Bankruptcy Law, which continues to receive positive reviews and was shortlisted for the Manitoba Book Awards Alexander Kennedy Isbister Prize for non-fiction. It was also the subject of a podcast interview on the New Books Network.

Not one to rest, Torrie published three scholarly articles – one as sole author and two as co-author, two being focused on bankruptcy, and one on the governance of AI in the Canadian banking context.   

As Editor-in-Chief of globally recognized peer-reviewed journal The Banking & Finance Law Review, Torrie oversaw the publishing of three issues in 2020, each of which is about 180-200 pages, and contains articles, case notes & comments and book reviews. Torrie wrote the introduction for one of these issues which was the Review’s second special issue on FinTech.

She also published a review of a book on Canadian legal education, scholarly blog posts, and an article on restructuring business in an insolvency trade magazine in addition to giving several presentations on her research at conferences and scholarly events, including the Annual Review of Insolvency Law Conference and the Osgoode Society Legal History Workshop.

In 2020, Torrie supervised a graduate law student, Mert Ozgur, who completed his LL.M. thesis on “Initial Coin Offerings as Securities Offerings: A Comparison of Legal Approaches in France and the United States,” graduating in 2021.

“I’m very honoured to receive this award for my research,” said Torrie. “Thanks to Michelle Gallant for nominating me, and to all of my terrific colleagues at the Faculty of Law for creating such a supportive environment. I’ve always had an avid interest in research, driven by a strong sense of intellectual curiosity. This abiding interest is what attracted me to a career in the academy and it continues to fuel my scholarly pursuits. Academic research takes ongoing, concerted effort and there can be a long lag time between doing the work and seeing the final work product. Nevertheless, there is great satisfaction in seeing multi-year projects, such as a scholarly monograph, come to final fruition and receive praise from peers. I hope to pass a sense of this passion, and its intrinsic rewards, to students at the Faculty of Law.”

One week after International Women’s Day and a month after Black History Month, the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law would like to shine a light on two black, female law students who have achieved success in an area that is a key component of all legal practice — negotiation. 

Law student, Reanna Blair

Reanna Blair and Menal Al Fekih are stellar negotiators. After their excellent performance in the Faculty’s mandatory negotiation course, they qualified to participate in the Robson Hall Negotiation Competition, where they achieved a first-place win. Then, they went on to represent Team Manitoba in the Canadian National Negotiation Competition. 

Law student, Menal Al Fekih

Menal Al Fekih believes that her active listening training to become a peer counsellor during her undergrad helped hone her negotiation skills. Reanna believes that her experiences as an advocate for students at the University of Manitoba helped make her a successful negotiator. Both students believe that their experiences will assist them greatly in the future. “In developing our negotiation skills, we developed other skills including teamwork, communication and problem solving,” Reanna says.

The four students, their thesis titles and Faculty Advisors are as follows:

Myles Davis
Thesis: An Addition to Canada’s Insolvency Regime: Section 192 of the Canada Business Corporations Act
Faculty Advisor: Assistant Professor Virginia Torrie

Jill Duncan
Thesis: Strike Strickland: A Made-in-Canada Approach to Ineffective Counsel Claims
Faculty Advisor: Professor Richard Jochelson

Kelechi Okorafor
Thesis: Principles-Based or Rules-Based System? A Case for Reform of the Regulatory Approach to Corporate Governance in the Nigerian Banking Sector
Faculty Advisor: Professor Bryan Schwartz

Sreekumar Panicker Kodiyath
Thesis: Excluded in the “Best Interests of the State”: Treatment of Minor Canadians Under Immigration and Refugee Protection Laws
Faculty Advisor: Professor M. Michelle Gallant

Today, she is a lecturer in Law at the University of Birmingham and is Deputy-Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub which is based in the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford, travelling the world in pursuit of gender equality, human rights and poverty. In her current role, she said she has been fortunate to collaborate with her intellectual heroes, working alongside a wide range of engaged students, respected academics, leading senior lawyers (Queen’s Counsel or QCs) in the UK, United Nations Special Rapporteurs and Supreme Court Justices from Canada, Rwanda, Germany, India, South Africa and the UK. As part of her job, she has organized and participated in conferences and workshops in Rwanda, Brazil, India, Colombia and Jamaica, exploring “stubborn and emerging threats to gender equality” and enriching her research with comparative insights in gender, human rights and poverty.

Robson Hall caught up with Campbell shortly after she published her monograph (based on her DPhil and a culmination of all her academic study to date), Women, Poverty, Equality: The Role of CEDAW (Hart Publishing, 2018).

Where did the impetus to write this book come from? Do you feel there’s more ground you can explore to lead to more books?

The UN stresses using human rights to remedy women’s poverty but this advocacy has not been done within a legal context. My monograph takes the next step and situates the relationship between gender and poverty in binding legal UN commitments. Surprisingly, the prominent legal instrument on women’s rights, UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, is silent to women’s poverty. I offer a sophisticated assessment of how to interpret equality in CEDAW to redress women’s poverty and how this interpretation can be integrated into the treaty’s accountability mechanisms. You can listen to a Oxford Human Rights RightsUp #RightNow podcast I did discussing the ideas on women, poverty and equality. 

My next research project continues to investigate how human rights can break cycles of poverty, specifically the extraterritorial dimensions of poverty. It is focusing on how the duty of cooperation contained in core UN human rights treaties can redress the extraterritorial aspects of poverty. The acts and omissions of states can perpetuate poverty far beyond their borders. There is very little accountability for this cause of poverty. States have agreed to cooperate to realize socio-economic rights but this legal obligation has been overlooked in the evolution of human rights law. As women disproportionately rely on socio-economic rights, understanding how the duty of cooperation can strengthen their protection. This project has strong implications for the future protection of women’s rightsand is really exciting as it speaks to intellectual challenges in human rights and government’s overseas aid development and international fiscal policies.

In your work, do you look at how Canada can work to improve the situation of Indigenous women living in poverty here?

My work does lay out arguments that advocates in Canada can draw on to demonstrate that a right to equality requires federal and provincial governments to tackle the poverty among Indigenous women.  I have also just finished an article advocating that rural and northern life should be included as a ground of discrimination under The Charter. This could have a significant impact on Indigenous women in Canada living in rural areas and Northern communities. Globally, the empirical evidence shows that rural women are more disadvantaged than urban women and urban and rural men. Including rural and northern life as a ground of discrimination can empower rural and Northern Indigenous women to hold the government to account for laws and policies that perpetuate rural disadvantage.

“All these courses opened my eyes to how law can be used to construct and protect privilege and how law can be used to transform power relations and create a more equal world.”

What courses that you took while in law at Robson Hall steered you in the direction you’ve gone today?

My law degree at Robson Hall was pivotal in pursuing an academic career in human rights and gender equality. I came into law school with a lot of energy and passion for social justice. The professors and the courses at Robson Hall gave me the tools to channel that passion into persuasive legal arguments. The optional courses in my third year were particularly influential—Gender and The Law, Poverty and the Law and The Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Reflecting back on my law degree, these courses were truly cutting edge and focusing in on some of the biggest challenges in law. All these courses opened my eyes to how law can be used to construct and protect privilege and how law can be used to transform power relations and create a more equal world.

What teachers had any impact on your career choices that led you to do work in this area of law?

The teachers at Robson Hall – Karen Busby, Lorna Turnbull, Michelle Gallant, Sarah Ludwig and Debra Parkes – all positively impacted my career. At law school, we were taught Gosselin v Quebec, where the Supreme Court of Canada held that drastically reducing social assistance benefits to those under 30 was not in violation of the right to equality in The Charter. This seemed intuitively wrong. Human rights are for everyone, not only the wealthy and the privileged. The interpretation and understanding of human rights needs to account for different experiences, including how poverty acts as an obstacle to equality. The professors at Robson Hall were incredibly supportive and encouraged me to follow this intuition into legally sophisticated arguments.   

“My biggest piece of advice to new students would be to whole heartedly throw yourself into the academic community at Robson Hall….Make friends….Read widely. Let yourself be curious.”

What can you tell current law students to make the most of their time at Robson Hall?

Law school is a very formative and exciting time. You are engaging with new ideas—judicial review, duty of care, justifications for limiting rights—and being trained in how to “think like a lawyer”. You are meeting and becoming friends with a peer group you will be interacting with throughout your professional career. I met so many wonderful people at Robson Hall and to this day I still consider some of those people from law school to be my closest and dearest friends.

My biggest piece of advice to new students would be to whole heartedly throw yourself into the academic community at Robson Hall. It is tempting to see the law degree as merely the means to an end: to focus solely on what you need to do to be competitive on the legal job market. These concerns are understandable, and I definitely was concerned about my career. Looking back, I wish I had been more patient. Attend the seminars, fundraisers, and social and community events. Make friends. Enjoy the experience of being in law school together. The intense work load and the intellectual challenges are truly bonding experiences. Read widely. Let yourself be curious. It is such a privilege to be in law school, to be given time and space to critically reflect on law, and make the most of your time.

Who would you most like to collaborate with in your field – who are your academic or scholarly heroes whose works you would recommend law students to read?

My academic hero is the supervisor for my DPhil, Professor Sandra Fredman (University of Oxford). I came to Oxford wanting to study the role of the right to equality in redressing poverty. Sandy channelled this idea into the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This fundamentally changed my academic career and put me on the path of studying gender equality and international human rights law. She has had unwavering patience in helping me form and shape my ideas. Sandy is also a personal inspiration. Her every day kindnesses and efforts to make academia more equal and inclusive are inspirational.  Her academic practice is a model on how to live the principles of equality and non-discrimination. She has continued to offer mentorship and friendship as I navigate the waters of early career academia. Working together over the year has been incredibly intellectually stimulating, pushed me to embrace the role of technology in the research and practice of human rights and been a source of joy.

Recommended Reading

• Sandra Fredman, Human Rights Transformed (OUP, 2011)—on the constellation of obligations raised by committing to human rights
• Martha Minnow, In Brown’s Wake (OUP, 2010)—on the legacy of Brown v Board of Education and the limits of law and courts in achieving transformative social change.
• Gwen Brodsky and Shelagh Day (2005), ‘Denial of the Means of Subsistence as an Equality Violation’, Acta Juridica, 149—on the role of equality in poverty alleviation
• Karl Klare, ‘Legal Culture and Transformative Constitutionalism’(1998) 14(1) South African Journal Of Human Rights 146—on reimaging the role of lawyers and law in constitutional law

For future scholars to Take up the Torch: “[T]here are two pressing areas of research. First, how can the law recognize, reduce and redistribute care work?…Second, how can socio-economic rights be fulfilled by holding government to account for budgets, tax codes and national and international fiscal policy?”

What gaps, or what more needs to be done in your area of research that you would like to see more students engaged in?

The ever increasing backlash and resistance to human rights, particularly socio-economic rights, means high-quality legal scholarship is desperately needed. From my perspective, there are two pressing areas of research. First, how can the law recognize, reduce and redistribute care work? Around the world women are disproportionately burdened with care work and the law has been slow to respond to this lived reality. Second, how can socio-economic rights be fulfilled by holding government to account for budgets, tax codes and national and international fiscal policy? The argument goes that socio-economic rights are too expensive and it is not the role of courts, unelected bodies, to interfere with government’s economic policy. However, by refusing to acknowledge the role of courts in holding states to account for socio-economic rights, human rights then become only for the wealthy and the privileged.

How can Robson Hall work to address those gaps – what opportunities are there for Manitoba’s only law school to train students in this area?

There are so many opportunities. Equality and human rights will impact everyone’s life beyond their time at law school and I think it is crucial that these rights get mainstreamed into core teaching at Robson Hall.  Furthermore, the Centre for Human Rights Research at Robson Hall is positioning itself as a world leader on human rights. The work they are doing on the right to water in Indigenous rights is pioneering. It is exciting to see interdisciplinary research on human rights as human rights are not the sole purview of lawyers. And it is getting to the heart of the challenges on holding government to account for socio-economic rights.

See: Master of Human Rights Program

What a ‘Friendly Manitoban’ brings to Oxford…

What unique Canadian (or even Winnipeg) perspectives do you bring to the faculty at Birmingham?

At the University of Birmingham, I teach Canadian Constitutional Law. It is fun to return back to my own constitution after years of teaching UK public law. In discussions with colleagues and students, I always bring a comparative perspective. Lady Hale, the Chief Justice of the UK Supreme Court recently said that the Canadian Supreme Court was the one to watch. In Canada, we approach this legal problem in this manner or in Canada the courts are pursuing this line of reasoning. I continually draw on the Canadian’s approach to highlight the differences, tensions, limitations and strengths in the UK.

I was born in Flin Flon, Manitoba and raised in Winnipeg and hope that in my teaching and research, I bring the friendliness that Winnipeggers and Manitobans are renowned for!

If you weren’t at Birmingham, where would you most like to work?

The University of Birmingham is a wonderful institution with academics committed to high-quality scholarship and legal activism. Two of my colleagues were key players in the activism to repeal the 8^thamendment of the Irish constitution that banned abortion. With such a great team of academics engaged in cutting edge research and teaching, I cannot imagine being happy anywhere else.

See also: Alumni Abroad: The future is equal

Dr. Bryan Schwartz

Dr. Schwartz, who holds the Asper Chair in International Business and Trade Law, spoke to the Labour Law subsection at the Midwinter Bar Association conference on January 18 on the subject of workplace discipline for an employee’s off duty conduct. Dr. Schwartz explored the constitutional and quasi-constitutional (privacy law, human rights law) dimensions of the issue, particularly in terms of off-duty free expression, and made some proposals for legislation, including changes to The Human Rights Code, to better protect both free expression and privacy. 

Drs. Michelle Gallant, Shauna Labman and Amar Khoday spoke on January 25 at the J. W. Dafoe Political Studies Students Conference 2018.

As part of a panel on Terrorism around the World, Dr. Labman laid the groundwork for discussion explaining how the failure to admit refugees to a country as a result of fear that they will bring terrorists into a nation’s midst, would only result in growing unrest in conflict areas. As part of her argument, she identified legislation in place to protect Canada from admitting individuals who may be of concern. 

Dr. Shauna Labman at the J.W. Dafoe 2018 Conference

On the same panel, Dr. Gallant shared insights from her research on international finance, regulation of banks, tax avoidance and money laundering to show how the tendency to blindly apply laws governing criminal finance to terrorism is not always appropriate. She suggests that such solutions are “grossly misconceived to put far too much weight on the finance of terrorism” as the best way to starve terrorism. Rather, she advocated for other ways to deal with terrorism.

Speaking on a panel addressing Counter-Terrorism and Civil Liberties, Dr. Khoday looked at the broad scope of anti-terrorist legislation located in U.S. immigration and refugee law in his talk titled “No Excuses: Should Asylum Seekers Be Barred From Accessing Refugee Status When Compelled to Provide ‘Material Support’ To Terrorist Organizations?” Focusing on a 2015 U.S. federal court case concerning an asylum-seeker, he examined how such legislation renders inadmissible those who are compelled to give “material support” to terrorist organizations against their will. The fact of duress offers no exception to inadmissibility. Such broad clauses found in U.S. legislation undermine the broader human rights purposes underlying the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. Dr. Khoday had previously written on a similar theme in a 2015 blog post on the Migration Law Research Cluster Blog site.

On April 24, Professors Mary Shariff and Michelle Gallant received the St. Paul’s College (SPC) Rector’s Medal for their work as co-chairs of the SPC Syrian Refugee Committee.

But for the professors, the work itself was more important than the award.

“For us, service to members of our human family – particularly the marginalized – is an obligation, and is its own reward,’ said Professor Michelle Gallant. “It’s a great privilege to work with such an extraordinary group of individuals at St. Paul’s and out in the community.”

In collaboration with five organizations including a number of church groups and others in Winnipeg, the group is coordinating sponsorship of a family of six newcomers.

Syrian refugees find themselves caught in circumstances they did not want nor create, cast from their homes, their cities, their cultures. The group in Winnipeg just wanted to do something to help out and we knew we could.

“We’re also sponsoring a local family to help bring some of their relatives to Winnipeg,” said Prof. Gallant. “Arriving families need everything – from a place to live to healthcare to education to learning English. They need help acclimatizing to things as mundane as using the banking system and knowing where to buy food.”

According to the professors, the generosity of everyone involved in this venture is extraordinary.

“The amazing people at St. Paul’s College are so overwhelmingly willing to do just about anything that is asked,” said Prof. Gallant. “Any one of us will one day find ourselves in need.

“Syrian refugees find themselves caught in circumstances they did not want nor create, cast from their homes, their cities, their cultures. The group in Winnipeg just wanted to do something to help out and we knew we could.”

The Robson Hall professors’ work in these sponsorship efforts includes coordinating donations, finding housing and local resources – such as language training and Arabic-speaking doctors – among a host of other duties.

“They kept spreadsheets of everything a family of six would need,” said Dean of Studies Moti Shojania. “Everything from pots, pans, dishes, bedding and furniture to games, toys and cleaning supplies – I can’t tell you how inspiring it was to see what these superwomen accomplished,” said St. Paul’s College Dean of Studies Moti Shojania. “They organized contacts with doctors, dentists, schools, volunteer drivers for medical appointments and a welcome committee for the family’s arrival at the airport.

“It was deeply moving to see the intelligence, wisdom and grace they brought to this project, and the humility with which they accepted thanks and praise. It was a privilege for all of us to be a part of this wonderful effort.”

The Syrian Refugee Initiative continues to invite new members and supporters. Visit their site.