Four Faculty of Law students receive provincial funding for graduate research

Four graduate students at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law are the recipients of Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarships in recognition of their impressive academic achievements.

Doctoral students Naiomi Metallic and Lindsay Borrows and master’s students Patrick Hart and Corinna Liu will each receive $12,000 to support their graduate research.

The scholarships, funded by the provincial government, recognize the outstanding academic achievement of students pursuing graduate studies in Alberta. The purpose of the scholarships is to attract top talent for graduate research in the province.

Metallic’s doctoral research uses an inter-societal law focus to examine how Indigenous laws can be revitalized and co-exist with Canadian legal orders. Her thesis, titled Finding Spaces for Indigenous Law in Canada, is supervised by Associate Professor Hadley Friedland.

Borrows, who specializes in Indigenous legal traditions, began her doctoral studies in the fall. She examines Anishinaabe law and its intersections and diversions from "Rights of Nature" frameworks. Her work is supervised by Friedland.

For his master’s project, Hart examines organized pseudolegal commercial arguments, a term used to describe a category of vexatious litigant strategies. His interdisciplinary research, which draws on law, philosophy and religious studies, looks at “the discursive gap between OPCA litigants and the courts that appears impossible for the judiciary to bridge.” Hart’s project is supervised by Professor Paul Paton.

In her LLM studies, Liu examines Canada's implementation of its obligations in the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women to eliminate gender discrimination in the workplace, specifically the rights to equal remuneration and social security. Her research is supervised by Professor Linda Reif.