See official Call for Papers here.
The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights is a centre within the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law devoted to advocacy, research and education in the area of constitutional rights in Canada. Since its inception in 2008, the Centre has intervened in several significant Charter litigation cases and has keenly observed the successes and challenges of public interest litigation.
Interventions in Charter litigation and public interest litigation brought by lawyers and legal advocacy organizations play a role, not only in the courts in which the matters take place, but also within the public discourse surrounding the Charter and human rights issues raised. Public interest litigation may also cause burdens on courts and have unintended negative consequences if they are not well planned, coordinated or brought prematurely.
The Asper Centre is convening a one-day Conference in March 2018 focused on legal strategies for successful public interest litigation in Canada as a means to bring together relevant stakeholders to share their challenges, successes and strategies in this field. The Conference is aimed at both practitioners (lawyers and NGOs) who are engaged in public interest litigation and scholars who study and analyze the impact of these cases, all of whom seek to ensure that public interest litigation has the maximum social impact possible.
- At this time, the Asper Centre is seeking submissions of abstracts covering the following broad areas for consideration:
- Development of meaningful strategies for public interest litigation and the coordination of strategic litigation between intervening organizations and stakeholders
- Reviewing the role of interveners in public interest litigation: Do their arguments really matter?
- Developing effective policy and legal advocacy strategies in addition to public interest litigation
- Case analyses to extract lessons from successful as well as unsuccessful public interest litigation across various substantive areas
The Conference is scheduled for March 2, 2018 and authors of papers chosen for presentation will be notified by December 15, 2017. Draft papers must be submitted by February 9, 2018. Papers will be in one of the two following formats:
Stream A: Longer paper covering an issue or related issues in public interest litigation with expected length of approximately 8,000 words.
Stream B: Shorter case analysis focusing on lessons learned from a specific public interest case with expected length of up to 1500 words.
Abstracts for papers should be maximum 250 words in length and sent with a 1-2 paragraph biographical statement to: Tal Schreier, Asper Centre Program Coordinator at tal.schreier@utoronto.ca
Deadline for Submissions: November 30, 2017
See official Call for Papers here.