Funded by a Canada Postdoctoral Research Award (CPRA) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Dr. Leering is undertaking a project entitled “Advancing reflective professionalism to prepare legal professionals for people-centred justice: New directions for research.” This project uses a framework known as integrative reflective practice to explore how legal education and professional development can prepare legal professionals to better respond to the needs of the people they serve.
Under the supervision of Professor David Wiseman, Dr. Leering’s postdoctoral project has already seen her co-organize the first-ever “Reflective Practice for Legal Professionals” Symposium series, which was co-hosted with Queen’s University between April and July 2026. She is currently curating resources to support the development of reflective practice to be hosted on the Series knowledge mobilization website, and guest co-editing two special international legal journals on the Series. She is now exploring approaches to strengthening reflective practice in legal education through working with interested faculty, case studies involving civil law teaching, and extending this work to the field of competency development for legal professionals. She also continues her lifelong research and advocacy to narrow justice gaps. In September, she helped to organize the first-ever Canadian Championing Health Justice Partnerships conference, which was held in Toronto. She will be working with the uOttawa Centre for Health Law, Policy, and Ethics to support their work to develop an academic health justice partnership. She is also a community member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre.
Dr. Leering brings extensive practical experience to this research. Before joining the Faculty of Law as a postdoctoral fellow, she spent nearly four decades as a lawyer and executive director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, a community legal clinic in Belleville, Ontario. Her work combined legal practice with community organizing and research on issues including poverty, hunger, homelessness and access to justice.
She also helped establish communities of practice among Ontario’s community legal clinics, including initiatives focused on rural and remote communities, evaluation and outcome measurement, and health justice partnerships. Her work has extended internationally through collaborations and training on legal empowerment, health justice partnerships, community lawyering and community-based legal services.
In recognition of her contributions to access to justice, Dr. Leering was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2022. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and Bond University, and has been a visiting scholar at Queen’s University Faculty of Law since 2024.
Through her postdoctoral research at uOttawa, Dr. Leering will bring this combination of scholarship, professional experience and community engagement to questions about how legal professionals learn and develop throughout their careers. Her work offers opportunities to explore how reflective practice can help connect legal education with the evolving needs of the people and communities the legal system serves.
The Common Law section extends its warmest welcome to Dr. Michèle Leering.