Keynote A: Current Legal Responses to Violence Against Women: Struggles in Feminist Law Reform

Keynote A: Current Legal Responses to Violence Against Women: Struggles in Feminist Law Reform

Dr. Sheehy is a renowned legal scholar and women’s rights advocate who has worked tirelessly to end violence against women for over 30 years. As an esteemed Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Sheehy has taught courses in Criminal Law and Procedure, Sexual Assault Law, and Defending Battered Women on Trial and has contributed to landmark Canadian legal cases regarding issues of consent and sexual assault, spousal assault, and the treatment of women in the justice system. Dr. Sheehy was co-counsel for the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund’s (LEAF) advance consent case (2011 SCC 28) and was on the legal committee for LEAF’s intervention in R v Barton and R v Gagnon, both argued at the Supreme Court of Canada in October 2018. She has also presented legal briefs before governmental committees urging amendments most recently to C-51 (re: criteria for incapacity to consent to sexual contact) and C-75 (re: need to legislate no consent to strangulation). Dr. Sheehy sat on the Advisory Board for Informed Opinions, a national organization dedicated to including women’s expert voices in Canadian public discourse until 2018, and now sits on the Expert Advisory Panel for the Canadian Femicide Observatory and the Advisory Board for the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre. In 2018, Dr. Sheehy was awarded the Governor General’s Persons Award and in 2019 will be invested with the Order of Ontario in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the intersection of law and violence against women.