ILJH Advisory Board member Professor John Borrows appointed as Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Anishinaabe man Professor Borrows is an intellectual leader in the field of Indigenous law. His scholarship examines Indigenous legal traditions and their intersection with settler law in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has had a huge influence on the work of academics and advocates around the world. Professor Borrows pioneered the world’s first joint JD degree in settler and Indigenous law at the University of Victoria law school in British Columbia. He has a long association with Melbourne Law School, teaching into the Melbourne Law Masters each year in his course ‘Comparative Indigenous Rights’, and was appointed in 2017 as MLS’ first Indigenous Scholar in Residence. He is known and appreciated for his humility and generosity as a teacher and mentor. At the Toronto Law Faculty he will teach a new compulsory course to all first-year law students that will address the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ laws with Canada's laws. As he put it in a recent interview:

“when people learn about Indigenous law, they understand law is more than parliamentary action. Law is participatory. It’s an activity involving us all. Therefore, when you when study Indigenous law, the need for everyone’s engagement is reinforced. Law is a social and human activity – it’s something you do – not merely something that’s done to you.. . . It's [about] trying to build lives together in ways that create order, certainty, and patterns for acting that aren't arbitrary. It’s important to teach this to students to expand our idea of law’s participatory potential.”

The ILJH congratulates Professor Borrows and looks forward to learning more about the potential of foundation course in Indigenous law, with an eye to thinking how the MLS curriculum might be similarly enriched in the future.

Read more about the appointment