Find more on ACPD-CALT's prizes here.  The call usually goes out in December. 

ACPD-CALT Prize for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Jaime Lavallee & Robin Hansen

Jaime Lavallee & Robin Hansen, Reflections on the TRC’s Mandate to Law Schools: Microscopic and Macroscopic Changes (2024) 40 Windsor Review of Law and Social Change 345

This academic article by Jaime M. N. Lavallee and Robin F. Hansen stood out as an excellent piece of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), distinguished by its unique style, crucial topic, and analytical depth.

Stylistically, the piece elegantly intertwines formal academic writing with an "informal truth-telling" narrative, as the authors share their personal journeys and positionalities. This "introduction of selves" is an effective and elegant choice, grounding the pedagogical insights in lived experience and demonstrating a commitment to "listen with an open heart, open mind, and willingness to understand and become competent, and maybe even compassionate, with each other’s limitations, challenges and opportunities".

This reflective and collaborative approach invites the reader into the complex, personal process of reconciliation in legal education, while offering tools for confronting similar challenges in our own institutions.

The article’s topic is of immediate relevance to life in Canada and contemporary legal education: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) mandate to law schools.It delves into the changes in  pedagogical substance and process required by the TRC's Calls to Action (CTAs), particularly 28, which demands a shift in how Canadian law is taught, including rejecting terra nullius and valorizing Indigenous legal orders.

By focusing on an internal review of a specific first-year course designed to meet these requirements, Lavallee and Hansen provide a practical, empirical lens on the challenges encountered. As a  detailed examination of a real-world implementation and its many struggles, it offers invaluable lessons for other institutions grappling with similar mandates.

The work frames the implementation of the TRC mandate as a long-term project involving "growth at both individual and institutional levels", conceptualized as "microscopic" and "macroscopic" changes. The authors use a "settler harm reduction approach" as an analytical tool to explain challenges and propose responses, acknowledging the discomfort and defensiveness that can arise when teaching about colonialism and privilege. The elegant structuring illustrates the ways that as teachers and instructors none of us are islands.  Instead we work in community environments even if the benefit of that community – and its pitfalls – can be obscured by the sometimes lonely nature of our endeavours.

CALT Scholarly paper award: Jennifer Raso

Victoria Adelmant, Jennifer Raso, Data Entry and Decision Chains: Distributed Responsibility and Bureaucratic Disempowerment in the UK’s Universal Credit Programme, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 45, Issue 2, Summer 2025, Pages 415–446, https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/10.1093/ojls/gqaf006

To recognize the work of new scholars, CALT conducts an annual competition for scholarly papers that make a substantial contribution to legal literature. Any member of CALT holding an appointment (tenured, tenure-track, post-doc or sessional contract) at a faculty or department of law at a Canadian university is eligible to enter the competition within seven years of commencing the first such appointment.

Victoria Adelmant and Jennifer Raso Data Entry and Decision Chains: Distributed Responsibility and Bureaucratic Disempowerment in the United Kingdom’s Universal Credit Programme, published in 2025 in the oxford journal of legal studyies

This academic article by Victoria Adelmant and CALT MEMBER Jennifer Raso offers an innovative framework for analysing “digital government”.   Its importance stems from its capacity to illuminate previously under-theorized challenges and redefine core public law concepts in the digital age.

Raso and Adelment conduct an analysis of the hidden architectural features underpinning digital welfare systems. They move us beyond a narrow focus on automated decision-making to reveal the reconfiguration of responsibility and accountability. By tracing how digitalization creates "extended chains of decision-making actors," it offers a  lens through which to understand the "public-isation" of previously private entities and the resulting "bureaucratic disempowerment" of all involved.

The article's power resides in its forward-looking vision. It doesn't offer simplistic solutions but instead articulates "key questions that ought to be central to public law scholarship" to meaningfully address the persistent accountability challenges posed by digital government. One reviewer noted that the calls for public law to re evaluate what should happen to public law in the digital age.  It also provides a fine grained application of ideas in the UK context, and ideally  will support Critical scholarship in Canada on this topic. .

CALT Academic Excellence Award: Jacob Weinrib

The annual CALT Prize for Academic Excellence honours exceptional contribution to research and law teaching by a Canadian law teacher in mid-career. 

As a legal scholar, Professor Weinrib's work is described as ambitious, timely, and of exceptional quality. His overarching goal is to formulate a general theory of public law that captures the distinctiveness of rights-based constitutional democracy and outlines the obligations of states within this framework. He has published articles in leading international journals and . His first monograph, Dimensions of Dignity, was hailed by one reviewer in a symposium as the "most important theoretical account of modern constitutional law that presently exists".  His upcoming second book, The Impasse of Constitutional Rights, has been accepted by Cambridge University Press and offers an original reconstruction of purposive interpretation and proportionality. One nominator states that Professor Weinrib's work is "brilliant, deep, and innovative, and it is already having – and will only continue to have for many years in the future – an important impact on Canadian law and institutions, but on law and institutions in many other jurisdictions around the world, as well". Another colleague emphasizes that Weinrib "is among the very best theoreticians combining sophisticated knowledge of philosophy, political theory, legal theory and constitutional and administrative law".  His writing Weinrib "combines clarity and depth of thought with admirable precision and elegance of expression”.  He has served his school in roles showing his commitment to the administrative and academic governance of the Faculty of Law, contributing to curriculum development, faculty appointments and promotions, student support, and research initiatives.

As an educator, Professor Weinrib has twice received the Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching from Queen's University Faculty of Law (2019 and 2023).  His teaching approach is innovative, integrating experiential learning, narrative strategies to foster curiosity, cutting-edge visual design in slideshows, and original forms of assessment that encourage deeper engagement and understanding. Students frequently describe his teaching as captivating, creative, conceptually clear, funny, and memorable. They laud him as their "favourite teacher ever" and credit him with providing a "transformative learning experience that pervades their legal careers," challenging them to "broaden the range of their legal understanding and to sharpen their powers of legal analysis". One colleague said,  "Students love him because he makes them love the law and makes them love thinking hard about the law – and that is the essence of a superb teacher".  Another  expressed his own envy, stating, "One cannot but be jealous of such teaching evaluations".