Amy Salyzyn is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law. She is a member of the Law Society of Ontario.
Amy received her J.S.D. from Yale Law School for her dissertation exploring the judicial regulation of lawyers in common law jurisdictions. She also received her LL.M. from Yale Law School and her J.D. from the University of Toronto Law School, where she was awarded the Dean’s Key upon graduation. Before coming to the University of Ottawa, Amy served as a judicial law clerk at the Court of Appeal for Ontario and practiced at a Toronto litigation boutique. Her litigation practice included a wide variety of civil and commercial litigation matters including breach of contract, tort, professional negligence, securities litigation and employment law as well as administrative law matters.
At the University of Ottawa, Amy teaches Torts as well as upper year seminars in legal ethics and AI and the legal profession. In 2014, Amy was selected to be a Fellow at the National Institute for the Teaching of Ethics and Professionalism.
Amy has written extensively in the area of legal ethics, lawyer regulation, the use of technology in the delivery of legal services and access to justice, having now published over 20 articles in Canadian and international peer-reviewed journals on these topics. She is also the co-author of Understanding Lawyers' Ethics in Canada, 3rd Edition, a leading Canadian legal ethics textbook and a General Editor of Canadian Legal Practice, a key practice resource in the area. Amy is a regular legal ethics columnist for Slaw.ca, a Canadian online legal magazine, and has contributed to Jotwell.com.
Amy’s recent research projects include her work as a co-investigator on a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant that is exploring, among other things, the ethical use of technology in our justice system. She also continues research under an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation which is financially supporting a multi-year project studying and suggesting concrete ways that technology can be used to facilitate more effective access to justice for Ontarians. This project has supported, among other things, the development of the Access to Justice Legal Apps Challenge Modules, a mini-course for high school students that aims to get participants to think of new ways to use technology to better increase access to justice, and to ultimately design a concept for a legal app to address an access to justice issue. In 2021, together with her colleague Florian Martin-Bariteau, Amy prepared Legal Ethics in a Digital Context for the Canadian Bar Association. This publication aims to help lawyers productively and responsibly interact with technology in their legal practices by identifying areas of potential benefits and risks, as well as best practices and further resources.
Amy is the Board Chair of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics. She has also served as co-chair of the board of the National Association of Women and the Law and as a “Learned Counsel Advisor” for the National Association of Bar Counsel (US), Entity Regulation Committee.
• Follow Amy on Twitter: @AmySalyzyn
• Read Amy’s research on her SSRN author page