Please join us for Breakfast with Justice Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada.
8:30 a.m. Grand Café and Bakery
Downtown at the Hawaii Arts Museum
230 S. Hotel Street.
Parking at Alii Place
$20.00 covers breakfast, coffee, gratuity, and breakfast and lei for Justice Abella
This Breakfast is jointly sponsored by the William S. Richardson School of Law Jurist in Residence Program and Hawaii Women Lawyers. We have this wonderful opportunity to get to know Justice Abella and her work in civil rights, gender equity, and access to justice. A little more about Justice Abella follows below.
Justice Abella was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. She is the first Jewish woman appointed to the Court.
She attended the University of Toronto, where she earned a B.A. in 1967 and an LL.B. in 1970. In 1964 she graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music in classical piano. She was called to the Ontario Bar in 1972 and practiced civil and criminal litigation until 1976 when she was appointed to the Ontario Family Court. She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992.
She was the sole Commissioner of the 1984 federal Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, creating the term and concept of "employment equity". The theories of "equality" and "discrimination" she developed in her report were adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada in its first decision dealing with equality rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1989. The report has been implemented by the governments of Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa. She subsequently served as Chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board (1984 to 1989), Chair of the Ontario Law Reform Commission (1989 to 1992), and Boulton Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University (1988 to 1992). She also served as a commissioner on the Ontario Human Rights Commission; as a member of the Ontario Public Service Labour Relations Tribunal; as Co-Chair of the University of Toronto Academic Discipline Tribunal; as a member of the Premier's Advisory Committee on Confederation; and as Chair of the Study on Access to Legal Services by the Disabled.
She has written over 80 articles and written or co-edited four books. She was made a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. She has given, among others, the Harlan Lecture at Princeton, the Ryan Lecture at Georgetown and the Anderson Lecture at Yale, and was the Bullock Chair at the Hebrew University, the Mackenzie King Distinguished Visiting Professor at Harvard and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the University of Toronto Law School.
She was a judge of the Giller Literary Prize; Chair of the Rhodes Selection Committee for Ontario; director of the Institute for Research on Public Policy; moderator of the English Language Leaders’ Debate in 1988; a member of the Canadian Judicial Council’s Inquiry on Donald Marshall, Jr.; Program Chair of the Governor General’s Canadian Study Conference; Chief Rapporteur in Halifax and Co-Chair in Vancouver of the 1992 Renewal of Canada Conferences; Trustee of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada; and Governor of the International Board of Governors of the Hebrew University.
Justice Abella has been active in Canadian judicial education, organizing the first judicial seminar in which all levels of the judiciary participated, the first judicial seminar in which persons outside the legal profession were invited to participate, the first national education program for administrative tribunals, and the first national conference for Canada's female judges. She is currently Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors of the National Judicial Institute.
Justice Abella was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law; the Distinguished Service Award of the Canadian Bar Association (Ontario); the International Justice Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation; the Human Relations Award of the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews; the Honourable Walter S. Tarnopolsky Human Rights Award; the Bora Laskin Award for Distinguished Service in Labour Law; and 32 honourary degrees.
Justice Abella was born in a Displaced Person's Camp in Stuttgart, Germany on July 1, 1946. Her family came to Canada as refugees in 1950. She is the daughter of Jacob and Fanny Silberman. She married Canadian historian Irving Abella on December 8, 1968. They have two sons: Jacob and Zachary, both lawyers.