View selected research on David Wiseman's SSRN Author page.
David Wiseman is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. Professor Wiseman’s research and other activities primarily focus on access to justice and on the legal protection of social and economic human rights, especially the right to housing. He has taught a range of courses, including: Property Law; Dispute Resolution & Professional Responsibility; Trusts; and, Access to Justice. Professor Wiseman also regularly co-teaches the A2J Lab experiential learning course where law students provide supervised legal assistance to tenants and collaborate with tenants’ rights organizations. Professor Wiseman served as Vice-Dean (Academic) for the English Common Law Program from 2021-2024 and has served as co-chair of the Admissions Committee and Joint Co-ordinator of the Social Justice Option. In 2024-25, he is serving as Academic Director for Experiential and Clinical Learning.
Professor Wiseman’s most research explores the role of smart legal forms in advancing access to justice and how regulatory initiatives, such as sandboxes, could better enable and support that role, particularly for people and communities living on low-income and experiencing other social disadvantages. That research builds on prior work (PDF, 928 KB) exploring the role of non-lawyers in providing community-based assistance to people experiencing everyday legal problems (that is, the role of ‘community justice helpers’) and associated work on the broader paradigm shift in Canada and comparative jurisdictions on regulation of access to legal assistance that this represents.
Professor Wiseman has published a number of articles, book chapters and reports on a range of other issues, such as: the role of paralegals in landlord-tenant disputes; access to justice in legal education and in regulation of the legal profession, including alternative business structures; access to justice problems in Canada’s refugee status determination system; the right to state-funded counsel in child protections matters; and, the institutional competence of courts in Charter litigation. Professor Wiseman has also drafted submissions to government law reform bodies in Canada and Australia and has appeared before United Nations human rights treaty monitoring bodies with and on behalf of NGOs from both countries. Professor Wiseman has volunteered at and served on the board of a community legal clinic in Melbourne and a community reintegration facility in Ottawa. In Windsor, he co-ordinated a legal information program on eviction prevention.
Professor Wiseman also has a special interest in teaching innovation and the role of law school in the continuum of legal education and professional development of lawyers. He has co-authored submissions to legal regulators on those issues and served as President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers from 2017-2019.
Prior to joining the faculty in 2010, Professor Wiseman was a Senior Advisor at the National Judicial Institute, Canada (NJI). Professor Wiseman was the co-ordinator of curriculum and resources on self-represented litigants and organized judicial education seminars in a variety of areas, including the Charter, Judicial Settlement Conferencing, Social Context, Criminal Law and Newly-Appointed Judges. Prior to the NJI, Professor Wiseman was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Windsor, teaching in Property, Constitutional Law and Access to Justice. In 2004 Professor Wiseman was awarded 'Professor of the Year' by the Windsor Law Students' Association. Before permanently relocating to Canada, Professor Wiseman was an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), where he also taught Property Law and Constitutional Law, and was admitted as a Barrister and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria.