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Firms' gifts bring international experts to Western Law

Western’s Law Dean and the 2010 January Term visitors: (Back row l-r) Dean Ian Holloway, Justice James O’Reilly, Jason Hynes, Paul Rishworth, Paul Roth (Front row l-r) Ron Atkey, Lusina Ho, Amita Dhanda, Rick Bigwood and Barry Barton.

Thanks to funding support from Miller Thomson LLP and Hicks Morley, Western Law students had a chance to learn from two of the brightest legal minds in New Zealand this past January without ever having to set a foot off campus.

Since its introduction in 1999, the January Term has provided upper-year Law students with exposure to legal expertise from all over the world in a wide range of subjects. In 2010, 14 visiting professors came to Western, including Paul Roth and Paul Rishworth.

“I have been most impressed with the vibrancy of Western’s scholarship and programs,” says Rishworth, who is a professor and Dean of Law at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. “The students in my class were a great bunch and I enjoyed teaching and learning from them. The course I taught in Comparative Constitutional Law and Human Rights looked at the ways in which human rights are protected in Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Pacific Islands.”

Rishworth was the inaugural Rt. Hon. John Turner Fellow at Western, a position funded by Miller Thomson LLP and a group of Western Law alumni at the Firm who made a new commitment of $100,000 to support the January Term Program.

Hicks Morley has also made a new commitment of $75,000 to ensure their firm’s January Term fellowship in labour and employment law continues for the next six years. “I appreciate the experience of teaching in a different law school and working with culturally different (and more mature) law students,” says visiting Professor Paul Roth, the 2010 Hicks Morley Fellow who hails from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. “The hospitality of Western Law is exceptional. Winter in Canada (at least for a month) is a great experience!”

Dean Ian Holloway says the January Term is one of the most special parts of Western Law’s curriculum. “Through it, we are able to draw to Western each year a group of tremendously accomplished visitors from all over the world, who teach courses we could not otherwise offer. It represents a way for us to broaden our institutional horizons and is a key part in our strategy for internationalization.”

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