Dr. Gwen Brodsky is in residence at UBC Law this year as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. She is currently teaching Law 309C, a seminar on “Sexism in the Law as a Tool of Colonialism” in our JD program (Fall 2013).
Dr. Brodsky (LLB, Victoria; LLM, Harvard; PhD, Osgoode) is a leading national and international expert on equality rights and the Charter. She has extensive experience arguing equality rights cases before tribunals and courts, and has acted as counsel in leading cases in the Supreme Court of Canada, including Andrews, Swain, Mossop, Thibaudeau, Gould, Vriend, Meiorin, Gosselin, Keays, and Moore. She has also appeared before commissions and treaty bodies of the United Nations and the Americas, and was the first Litigation Director of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF).
For the past decade, Dr. Brodsky’s work has focused on the inter-connections between equality rights, social and economic rights, and Aboriginal rights, and on the means of fulfilling them in constitutional and human rights contexts. She is counsel to the petitioners in McIvor v. Canada, an ongoing challenge to sex discrimination against Aboriginal women and their descendants in the Indian Act, and represented the Native Women’s Association of Canada on the issue of the murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in British Columbia.
Dr. Brodsky has written extensively about equality rights theory, social and economic rights, the Charter, the duty to accommodate, and access to justice problems experienced by members of disadvantaged groups. She has taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia and in the Akitsiraq Law Program in Iqaluit.
If you wish to get in touch with Dr. Brodsky, her contact information while at UBC is as follows:
Dr. Gwen Brodsky
Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia
tel: 604 874 9211
gbrodsky@mail.ubc.ca
