Vanessa Gruben is a member of the Common Law section of theUniversity of Ottawa, Faculty of Law where she teaches property law and family law. Professor Gruben also teaches a seminar on access to health care, which is a course in the social justice concentration. In 2011, she will be co-teaching a bilingual, bijural course on public health law.
After graduating from the University of Ottawa’s Common Law program, she clerked for Chief Justice Richard of the Federal Court of Appeal and then Justice Bastarache of the Supreme Court of Canada. She was called to the bar in Ontario in 2003, after which she practiced as an associate in the litigation group of a national law firm. She joined the Faculty as an assistant professor after graduating as a James Kent Scholar from ColumbiaUniversity’s Master of Laws program.
Professor Gruben’s research focuses on the legal regulation of various aspects of assisted human reproduction including contractual disputes over frozen embryos, privacy and access to information, gamete donor anonymity, the regulation and funding of assisted reproductive technologies, and the constitutionality of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Her research also includes health law more generally as well as the protection of language rights in Canada.
In addition to her research work, Professor Gruben has appeared on behalf of Amnesty International Canada before the Supreme Court of Canada in Charkaoui v. Canada, [2007] 1 S.C.R. 350;Charkaoui v. Canada, [2008] 2 S.C.R. 326; and Khadr v. Canada, [2010] SCC 3 and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. She is also a member of the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board and the Health Services Appeal and Review Board.