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Viscount Bennett Professor of Law: Professor Llewellyn

Posted by School of Law on August 17, 2012 in News, Faculty Interest, Student Interest, Staff Interest, Alumni & Friends
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law_faculty_jennifer_llewellyn

Dean Kim Brooks is pleased to name Professor Jennifer Llewellyn the Viscount Bennett Professor of Law.

Established in 1944 by the Right Honourable RB Bennett (later Viscount Bennett) – law school alumnus, lawyer and founding partner of Bennett Jones, benefactor, and former Prime Minister of Canada – the professorship supports great teaching and meaningful contributions to scholarship and international affairs. Previous chairholders include Professor JE Moffatt Hancock, a leading authority in conflict of laws who went on to teach at Stanford Law School.

Professor Jennifer Llewellyn is an award-winning teacher and researcher in the areas of restorative justice, human rights, Canadian constitutional law, and peacebuilding. She has published extensively on the theory and practice of restorative justice, through which justice is not only a legal righting of wrongs but also a means to address harms to relationships caused by injustice. Restorative justice – now being applied by individuals, groups, communities, and entire nations – aims at restoring relationships to ones marked by equal respect, concern and dignity: the same qualities underpinning our ideas of basic or fundamental human rights.

Jennifer has worked with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, served as senior consultant for the UN Development Program, sits on the Working Party on Restorative Justice (WPRJ) of the Alliance of NGOs on Criminal Prevention and Criminal Justice (New York), and is co-director of the Restorative Justice, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding Project based at the Kroc Institute for Peace (Notre Dame). She is currently working with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission supporting the development of a restorative approach to human rights. Most recently, she was the Director of the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Community University Research Alliance (NSRJ-CURA), an interdisciplinary research initiative exploring the institutionalization of restorative justice practice based on the experience of the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program – one of the most comprehensive and developed restorative justice programs in the world.

As chair, Jennifer will foster collaborative research with institutions, governments and NGOs, and will teach International Human Rights at the law school. Her academic and policy work builds on the law school’s strong international reputation for outstanding contributions to scholarship and commitment to human rights, and we are delighted for the opportunities her colleagues and students will have to benefit from this work.