Canadian Lawyer

September 2020

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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TOP 25 MOST INFLUENTIAL SPECIAL REPORT 32 www.canadianlawyermag.com GOVERNMENT/NON-PROFITS/ASSOCIATIONS PETER SANKOFF Edmonton Professor, University of Alberta Following the COVID-19 outbreak, Peter Sankoff went out of his way to engage the legal community, which was forced into remote work. Even as he kept up his full-time teaching schedule through delivering online lectures, he devoted his personal time to co-ordinating webinars for lawyers and for law students. He donated the proceeds of these webinars to numerous charities, including initiatives supporting lawyers and artists. If a student could not afford the $10 fee, Sankoff and other donors would cover the amount. He also launched internship opportunities for law students who found themselves unemployed following the public health crisis. He takes his job as an educator beyond the classroom — he has coached his university's Gale Cup moot team, which won for three straight years under his guidance. He also utilizes social media to make complex legal issues more accessible and comprehensible to the public, such as through posting Twitter threads. He co-hosts an award-winning animal law podcast called Paw and Order. GOVERNMENT/NON-PROFITS/ASSOCIATIONS VIVENE SALMON Toronto President, Canadian Bar Association Vivene Salmon is the first person of colour and the second in-house counsel to lead the Canadian Bar Association in its more than 120 years of existence. In this role, Salmon has devoted attention to bridging the gap among all generations of lawyers, such as through her Conversations with the President podcast series, which discusses technology, innovation and the different ways of practising law. She has also been instrumental in modernizing how the CBA communicates with its members, such as by using social media and vlogs. Amid the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 crisis, she helped in launching a national task force that would deal with the pandemic's impacts on the justice sector. She also chaired the organizing committee for the CBA's first conference dedicated to racialized lawyers. She is vice president, country compliance manager, global banking and markets compliance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Toronto, where she develops policies and procedures to comply with regulatory requirements. GOVERNMENT/NON-PROFITS/ASSOCIATIONS DAVID STRATAS Ottawa Justice, Federal Court of Appeal David Stratas is regarded as one of the most influential judges sitting on an intermediate appellate court in Canada. His impact on administrative law through his judicial decisions, publications and conferences cannot be doubted. Back in 2017, he wrote an article titled The Canadian Law of Judicial Review: A Plea for Doctrinal Coherence and Consistency, wherein he questioned the decision in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9 and called attention to the benefits of employing doctrinal clarity, unity and simplicity in judicial review. In 2019, he published two additional online articles, which were A Decade of Dunsmuir: Please No More and Looking Past Dunsmuir: Beginning Afresh. The latter was particularly impactful, even influencing the discussion of the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, 2019 SCC 65. The Vavilov judgment went on to cite 12 decisions authored by Stratas. He also teaches administrative law, and his annual legal writing course at the Queen's University Faculty of Law is considered the most popular course there.

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