A graduating Common Law Section student is among the inaugural winners of the Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella Prize.
The $1,000 Prize will be presented annually by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) to a graduating law student in each Canadian law school who is “most likely to positively influence equity and social justice in Canada or globally.”
Justice Abella retired from the Supreme Court of Canada last year when she turned 75.
The Common Law winner, Allana Haist, is described by the Society as a “champion of legal systems reform.”
“She is an engaged community activist for prisoner rights and for education about the harms of intimate partner violence. Her current project is a “Hero’s Journey into the Law,” a legal guide for women in shelters. Above all, she is a mother and an advocate for fellow survivors.”
Haist has a PhD in Political Science from TU Chemnitz in Germany and an MA in Applied Ethics from KU Leuven in Belgium.
She aims to make the law trauma-informed and improve access to the justice sytem. She has served on the Board of Directors for the Elizabeth Fry Society of Ottawa and as a volunteer for the Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization and for Ovarian Cancer Canada’s Walk of Hope. During law school, she did a legislative internship with well-known prison reform activist Senator Kim Pate, who she continued to work with over the summer to create a series of legal guides to inform prisoners of their rights.
She was a recipient of the Feminist Public Interest Fellowship, which she used to work at Luke’s Place, a charitable organization that helps frontline workers and women and children who are escaping violence find help through the law. Among her other achievements, her paper on coercive control was highlighted in Luke's Place's 2022 submissions to the Status of Women Committee on Intimate Partner Violence and Domestic Violence in Canada.
A full list of the winners is available.
The Society describes Abella as “a changemaker celebrated for her visionary intellectual contributions and commitment to building equality and equity across Canadian society and beyond.”
During her distinguished career, she was responsible for many ground breaking legal and judicial contributions. She chaired and authored the Ontario Study on Access to Legal Services by the Disabled in 1983 and 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 Royal Commission 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.
On May 12-13, the uOttawa Public Law Centre, Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice, Human Rights Research and Education Centre and Advocates Society, will be holding a two-day conference to celebrate the incredible life and achievements of Abella. The conference, entitled A Life of Firsts, will examine her work both before and during her time on the Supreme Court of Canada.
The conference will be online and in person at the Delta Ottawa, with a reception the night of May 11 and a dinner on May 12.
Registration is open.