Every year, CALT grants three awards to Canadian law teachers who are members of CALT

CALT Academic Excellence award 

CALT Scholarly paper award

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.

CALT Prize for Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

The annual CALT Prize for Scholarship of Teaching & Learning honours exceptional contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by a Canadian law teacher. While SoTL is defined variously, a common understanding is that of investigating questions related to teaching and learning and sharing the answers obtained through peer review, publication, performance or presentation.[1]

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2023 Awards

The Canadian Association of Law Teachers congratulates  

Valerie Oosterveld University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law   2023 Winner CALT Prize for Academic Excellence 

 The ACPD-CALT Academic Excellence award honours exceptional contributions to research and law teaching by a Canadian law teacher in mid-career.  This year the Committee has awarded the prize to accomplished and respected teacher, researcher, and administrator and an advocate and lawyer for human rights in Canada, abroad and in outer space.  Her research has won awards and she is widely considered to be among the top experts in the world on gender-based crimes. Her teaching has also won faculty and university level recognition, and she has been a driving force behind the introduction of a variety of experiential teaching initiatives at her faculty.  She has also served as an Associate Dean, and in a variety of university level centres and institutes. The reference letters that accompanied Prof. Oosterveld’s nomination for this prize were detailed and extremely enthusiastic.  They illustrated a depth of admiration for Professor Oosterveld held by students, colleagues at home and around the world, and peers in the legal profession.   ACPD-CALT is delighted to honour this exceptional legal scholar and teacher. 

Daniel Del Gobbo:    Legal Ethics and the Promotion of Substantive Equality (2022) 100 Can. Bar Rev 439 2023 WINNER CALT SCHOLARLY PAPER AWARD 

This paper makes a bold yet nuanced intervention into a complex and contentious debate in a way that will be of interest to practitioners, law students ,and  scholars of the profession,  professional ethics, and equality.   Focusing on an access to justice framing of the debate, and addressing the 2022 revisions to the  Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Model Code of Professional Conduct, Del Gobbo works towards recommendations which would recognize a sweeping set of professional activities in which lawyers might be obliged to, or permitted to, choose courses of action which would extend substantive equality.   Situating the debate over obligations to promote substantive equality in a long history of contested visions of the lawyers professional ethics, Del Gobbo is able to draw on a wide range of sources, including Supreme Court decisions, discipline tribunal decisions, the Law Society of Ontario’s Working Together for Change:Strategies to Address Issues of Systemic Racism in the Legal Professions (November 2016),  previous interventions by scholars in legal ethics,(draft) ethical rules and hyptheticals drawn from areas as diverse as labour and employment and family law.  His recommendations are specifically aimed at the Model Code, but his work provides a useful and challenging introduction to a widespread debate about lawyers, professional obligations, and equality. Honourable mentions Stefanie Carsley Surrogacy in Canada: Lawyers’ Experiences and Practices (2022) 34 CJWL 41 Yuvraj Joshi, Racial Justice and Peace (2021) 110 Georgetown Law Journal 1325 

Nickie Nikolaou, Lisa Silver and Alexander Dingman   Creating the “Whole Advocate” through Experiential Learning in the Law Classroom   2023 Can. Legal Educ. Ann. Rev. 1 2023 WINNER ACPD=CALT PRIZE FOR SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING 

In this work, the authors carefully connect their research to the existing literature, and they uncover something neat about how students need more direction as to what reflective practice is, rather than just opportunities to do it. This article is a strong exemplar of what is useful and needed in the field of scholarship on teaching and learning. That is, well-undertaken, well-written, thoughtful, empirically-based, and literature-situated … and focusing on a recently implemented improvement-oriented legal education initiative in a newly-important area of legal education.  

Past Award Winners