About Us (2019)
Conference Organizing Team
The 2019 Conference Organizing Committee is made up of lawyers, academics, students and civil society actors from across Canada. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at conference@foodlaw.ca.
Abra Brynne
Abra is a nationally respected food systems advocate. She has worked closely with farmers and on food systems for almost thirty years, with a priority on food value chains and the regulatory regimes that impede or support them. She is currently the Executive Director of the Central Kootenay Food Policy Council. She has held leadership positions on numerous Boards and committees over many years, all connected with healthy communities and food in some way.
Jamie Baxter
Jamie Baxter is an Assistant Professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, where he studies land and property, agriculture and food systems governance, primarily at the local level. He has been active in cultivating the field of food law and policy in Canada and much of his current work focuses on how communities, organizations, farms and firms engage with law and confront legal barriers to building more sustainable food systems. He holds degrees in economics and in law from McMaster University, the University of Toronto, and Yale, and has been a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky.
Victoria Baylis
Victoria is a first year JD student at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. She completed her undergraduate studies with a BSc. in Biology from the University of British Columbia. Her interests lie in food security, environmental sustainability and the study of life cycle analyses, as well as in the promotion of greater corporate responsibility and accountability. She is honored to be a voice for students in this platform. Her goal is to garner more student participation for the 2019 conference.
Sarah Berger Richardson
Sarah is a Schulich Fellow at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and ethics in food law and policy, particularly the social and cultural values underlying food safety regulations. Recently, she worked with the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, providing policy advice to the Government of Northwest Territories on their agriculture regulatory framework. She is completing a doctorate at the Faculty of Law at McGill University.
DeboraH Curran
Jessica Dufresne
Jessica est candidate au doctorat en droit et chargée de cours à la Faculté de droit de l'Université d'Ottawa.
Avocate membre du Barreau du Québec, elle est également titulaire d'une licence en droit de l'Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne, d'un baccalauréat en droit de l'Université Laval et d'une maîtrise en droit international de l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) au cours de laquelle elle a rédigé un mémoire portant sur la protection du droit à l'alimentation en Inde. Ses études doctorales portent actuellement sur le rôle des municipalités dans la réalisation du droit à l’alimentation au Canada.
Jessica Cytryn
Jessica is pursuing a joint civil law and common law degree at McGill University's Faculty of Law. Before law school, Jessica completed a degree in food history, wrote a thesis on the history of grape wine in China, and worked in the restaurant industry for 11 years. At McGill, Jessica founded the McGill Food Law Society and acted as its President for two years. In recognition of her commitment to food law, Jessica has been named the Lallemand Scholar at McGill's Centre for Intellectual Property Policy, where she explores the intersection between IP law and food. She is also the founder and coordinator of the McGill Law Wine Tasting Club and works as a student at law at McCarthy Tétrault LLP.
Madeleine Gottesman
Madeleine is a JD/MBA student at the University of Toronto and thrilled to help plan the 2019 Canada’s Association for Food Law and Policy conference! She co-founded U of T Law’s Food Law and Policy Association in 2017, and she is passionate about food security, food worker rights, the environmental impact of food production, and food innovations.
Amélie Gouin
Amélie is a senior associate at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP. She specialises in commercial litigation and practices mainly in the fields of competition law, advertisement and marketing, extraordinary recourses, shareholder disputes, fraud and intellectual property. She completed her studies in civil law and common law at McGill University. Since 2011, Ms. Gouin has been involved in the activities of the Young Chamber of Commerce of Montreal. She currently serves as supervising lawyer for McGill’s Food and Agriculture Law Clinic.
Glenford Jameson
Glenford is a lawyer at G. S. Jameson & Company, where his practice is focused on corporate-commercial and administrative-regulatory law in the business context, where he advises organizations on structure, corporate governance, and regulatory compliance. Glenford leverages his significant legal experience in the food sector for entities ranging from start-ups to multinationals that encounter a high degree of regulation, or that seek to challenge regulatory regimes under which food is produced and sold in Canada. He is also adjunct faculty at Michigan State College of Law, where he teaches Canadian Food Law and Regulation.
Nadia Lambek
Nadia Lambek is a Doctor of Juridical Science candidate at the University of Toronto, and a human rights lawyer, researcher and advocate focused on food system transitions and the rights of working people. Nadia is adjunct faculty at Vermont Law School where she teaches courses on global food security governance. In 2018, she worked with the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism to the UN Committee on World Food Security on a report monitoring realization of the right to food. She is an editor of Rethinking Food Systems: Structural Challenges, New Strategies and the Law (Springer 2014).
Lauren McCulloch
Lauren is a lawyer whose practice encompasses a broad range of civil and commercial litigation, including insurance defence, property damage, fraud, construction disputes, and professional negligence. She completed her J.D. at Dalhousie University, specializing her degree in health law. Prior to law school Lauren attended the University of Guelph and obtained an undergraduate degree in Nutrition and Nutraceutical Sciences and a graduate degree in Human Health and Nutritional Sciences.
Heather McLeod-Kilmurray
Heather McLeod-Kilmurray is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa and Co-Director of its Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability (CELGS). Her research and teaching focus on Food Law, Toxic Torts and Environmental Justice. She is co-author of The Canadian Law of Toxic Torts with Lynda Collins, and co-editor of the forthcoming Canadian Food Law and Policy with Nathalie Chalifour and Angela Lee. She co-teaches a Food Law course with Angela Lee. She is a member of the Ottawa Food Policy Council and a the Management Advisory Board of Wilfrid Laurier University's Centre for Sustainable Food Systems.
Stepan Wood
Stepan’s research relates to corporate social responsibility, sustainability, globalization, transnational governance, voluntary standards, climate change, and environmental law. He leads the interdisciplinary Transnational Business Governance Interactions (TBGI) project, an international research network that examines the drivers, dynamics, and impacts of competition, cooperation, coordination, and conflict among transnational initiatives to regulate global business. His co-authored book, A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance (UBC Press, 2010), was shortlisted for the Donald Smiley award for best book on Canadian politics. Professor Wood is founding co-chair of the Willms & Shier Environmental Law Moot, Vice-Chair of the Canadian national committee on environmental management systems standards, and a lead Canadian negotiator of the ISO 14001 and 14004 standards.
University of Toronto Faculty Sponsors
Angela Fernandez
Angela is Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of History. She was a leader for four years of a Working Group at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute “Animals in the Law and Humanities” and contributor to the 2018-19 “Animal Law Lab” at the Faculty of Law. Professor Fernandez is the author of a book-length study on Pierson v. Post, the famous first possession case often used to begin the study of American (and sometimes Canadian) property law: Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is an Associate Editor (Book Reviews) for Law and History Review and a member of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the American Society for Legal History. She is also on the Board of Directors for Animal Justice Canada and is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Trudo Lemmens
Trudo (LicJur, LLM (bioethics), DCL) is Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, with cross appointments in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Joint Centre for Bioethics. His research focuses on the interaction between law, governance mechanisms, and ethical norms and values in the context of health care, biomedical research, health product development, and--more generally--knowledge production. His publications appeared in leading journals of law, science, medicine, health policy, and bioethics.