The Dignity of Law: The Legacy of Justice Louis LeBel

Malcolm Thorburn served as Law Clerk to Mr. Justice Louis LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000-2001. He is now an associate professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Until 2012, he held the Canada Research Chair in Crime, Security and Constitutionalism at Queen's University. He holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Toronto and the University of Pennsylvania and in law from the University of Toronto and Columbia Law School. He has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University (2008), Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (2011), the French National Centre for Criminology (CESDIP) in Paris, France (2011) and Magdalen College, Oxford (2011-2012).

He is an associate editor of the New Criminal Law Review and a member of the editorial boards of Law and Philosophy and Criminal Law and Philosophy. His writing focuses on theoretical issues in and around criminal justice and constitutional theory. His work has appeared in such publications as the Yale Law Journal, the Boston University Law Review, the University of Toronto Law Journal, Criminal Law and Philosophy and many books at Oxford University Press and Hart Publishing. He is the editor (with David Dyzenhaus) of a forthcoming collection entitled The Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press).

Dwight Newman, K.C., B.A., M.A.T.S., J.D., M.Sc., B.C.L., M.Phil., D.Phil., is a Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law at the University of Saskatchewan, where he started in a faculty position in 2005 and has also served a three-year term as Associate Dean. He has also taught during shorter visiting terms at Alberta, McGill and Oxford. In recent years, he has been a visiting fellow at Princeton, the Université de Montréal, Cambridge, the University of Western Australia and Oxford. Dr. Newman has published around 150 articles or book chapters and fifteen books. His books include two monographs on the duty to consult doctrine, a book on Natural Resource Jurisdiction in Canada (2013), both the Charter of Rights title of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada and The Law of the Canadian Constitution (a general treatise with co-author Justice Guy Régimbald) (2013; second edition 2017), and Mining Law of Canada (2018). His edited collections include Religious Freedom and Communities (2016), Business Implications of Aboriginal Law (2018), Indigenous-Industry Agreements, Natural Resources, and the Law (co-edited in 2021) and the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on the International Law of Indigenous Rights (2022).

His writing has been cited by all levels of Canadian courts, including repeatedly by the Supreme Court of Canada. He is a Munk Senior Fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and has contributed to policy discussions by publishing a number of think tank reports. He has also served as an expert member of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and contributed to discussions on international norms on related issues. He has delivered dozens of presentations to a variety of audiences on six continents and has published many op eds in leading Canadian and American newspapers. Prior to entering a faculty role, Dr. Newman clerked for Chief Justice Lamer and Justice LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada, worked for NGOs in South Africa and Hong Kong and for the Canadian Department of Justice, and completed his graduate studies at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a member of the Ontario and Saskatchewan bars and he has done legal work for industry, government and Indigenous communities on constitutional law issues, as well as consulting work on resource issues for international investment entities. In 2017, he was named to the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2018 he was designated a Queen’s Counsel (now King’s Counsel).