Amy F. Salyzyn

Amy Salyzyn is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law. She is a member of the Law Society of Ontario.

Amy received her J.S.D. from Yale Law School for her dissertation exploring the judicial regulation of lawyers in common law jurisdictions. She also received her LL.M. from Yale Law School and her J.D. from the University of Toronto Law School, where she was awarded the Dean’s Key upon graduation. Before coming to the University of Ottawa, Amy served as a judicial law clerk at the Court of Appeal for Ontario and practiced at a Toronto litigation boutique. Her litigation practice included a wide variety of civil and commercial litigation matters including breach of contract, tort, professional negligence, securities litigation and employment law as well as administrative law matters.

At the University of Ottawa, Amy teaches Torts as well as upper year seminars in legal ethics and AI and the legal profession. In 2014, Amy was selected to be a Fellow at the National Institute for the Teaching of Ethics and Professionalism.

Amy has written extensively in the area of legal ethics, lawyer regulation, the use of technology in the delivery of legal services and access to justice, having now published over 20 articles in Canadian and international peer-reviewed journals on these topics. She is also the co-author of Understanding Lawyers' Ethics in Canada, 3rd Edition, a leading Canadian legal ethics textbook and a General Editor of Canadian Legal Practice, a key practice resource in the area. Amy is a regular legal ethics columnist for Slaw.ca, a Canadian online legal magazine, and has contributed to Jotwell.com.

Amy’s recent research projects include her work as a co-investigator on a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant that is exploring, among other things, the ethical use of technology in our justice system. She also continues research under an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation which is financially supporting a multi-year project studying and suggesting concrete ways that technology can be used to facilitate more effective access to justice for Ontarians. This project has supported, among other things, the development of the Access to Justice Legal Apps Challenge Modules, a mini-course for high school students that aims to get participants to think of new ways to use technology to better increase access to justice, and to ultimately design a concept for a legal app to address an access to justice issue. In 2021, together with her colleague Florian Martin-Bariteau, Amy prepared Legal Ethics in a Digital Context for the Canadian Bar Association. This publication aims to help lawyers productively and responsibly interact with technology in their legal practices by identifying areas of potential benefits and risks, as well as best practices and further resources.

Amy is the Board Chair of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics. She has also served as co-chair of the board of the National Association of Women and the Law and as a “Learned Counsel Advisor” for the National Association of Bar Counsel (US), Entity Regulation Committee.

•    Follow Amy on Twitter: @AmySalyzyn
•    Read Amy’s research on her SSRN author page

• “Court Form Accessibility: Evaluating Online Guided Pathways as a Person-Centred Access to Justice Intervention” Canadian Journal of Law and Society (forthcoming) (with Jacquelyn Burkell, Esti Azizi, and David Westcott)
• “Beyond the Numbers: Statistical and Data Literacy, Domain Literacy and Supreme Court of Canada Data Analytics” (2024) 115(2) Supreme Court Law Review (with Jena McGil)
• “Preventing Misgendering in Canadian Courts: Respectful Forms of Address Directives” (2023) 101 Canadian Bar Review 391 (with Samuel Singer)
• “Open Courts, Privacy and Equality in a Digital Era: The Supreme Court of Canada’s 2021 Open Court Jurisprudence” (2023) 108(2) Supreme Court Law Review (with Samuel Singer)  
• “A Mixed Bag: Critical Reflections on the Ethical Principles for Judges” (2022) 100(3) Canadian Bar Review 325 (with Richard Devlin, Jula Hughes, Pooja Parmar and Stephen G.A. Pitel)  
• “AI and Legal Ethics” Artificial Intelligence and the Law in Canada, in Florian Martin-Bariteau & Teresa Scassa, (eds) Toronto: LexisNexis Canada, 2021  
• “Professional Responsibility and the Defence of Extractive Corporations in Transnational Human Rights and Environmental Litigation in Canadian Courts” Legal Ethics 24(2) (2021) Legal Ethics 24 (with P. Simons)  
• “Judging by Numbers: How will judicial analytics impact the justice system and its stakeholders?” Dalhousie Law Journal 44:1 (2021) Dalhousie Law Journal 250 (with J. McGill)  
• “Developing Privacy Best Practices for Direct-to-Public Legal Apps: Observations and Lessons Learned, (2020) 18(1) Canadian Journal of Law and Technology (with T. Scassa, J. McGill and S. Bouclin).  
• “What Makes Court Forms Complex? Studying Empirical Support for a Functional Literacy Approach”, (2019) 15 Journal of Law and Equality 31 (co-authored with J. Burkell, E Costain and B Piva)  
• “Protecting the Public Interest: Law Society Decision-Making after Trinity Western University” (2019) 97(1) Canadian Bar Review 70 (co-authored with A Woolley)