The eQuality Project brings together a broad range of civil society, educational and government partners interested in exploring young peoples’ experiences in networked spaces, specifically examining the targeting of youth and other marginalized community members by corporations. The project seeks to answer the question of how society can create an equality enhancing and affirming environment that enables all young people to fully participate. The project takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of online behavioural targeting, other corporate practices, and technology-facilitated violence as elements that shape the potential for a lived equality in networked spaces.  It marks an important contribution to legal scholarship in that it aims to ensure that the voices of young people from marginalized communities are heard by policymakers as the nation’s social, legal and cultural frameworks respond to our increasingly digitally networked and automated world.

Co-Directors:  Valerie Steeves and Jane Bailey

The uOttawa Legal Technology Lab is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Faculties of Law and Engineering, funded by Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), to conduct legal technology research and implement legal technology solutions at the University of Ottawa.  

The legal sector is changing. Law firms face growing pressures to provide more cost-effective services. Governments, industries and citizens are struggling with making evidence-based decisions on the basis of more and increasingly complex legal information. Legal expertise remains scarce, expensive and inaccessible resulting in a large unmet demand for legal services and an access-to-justice gap. Technology offers novel solutions to deal with these challenges.

Through the Centre for Law, Technology and Society (CLTS) and its world-class researchers, the University of Ottawa is already a leader in the technology law, ethics and policy space. The uOttawa Legal Technology Lab complements the existing activities of the CLTS through applied legal technology research and the implementation of legal technology projects.

Lead: Dr. Wolfgang Alschner (Faculty of Law, Common Law Section)
Co-Lead: Dr. Diana Inkpen (Faculty of Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Pathways International works at the intersection of research, policy, and programming to champion and design protection solutions for refugees. Our global team specializes in cross-sectoral work, providing high-quality and tailored support to governments, civil society, and private sector leaders in support of an improved refugee protection system.

An initiative for a better understanding and framing of the ethical, legal and societal implications of AI by leveraging a transdisciplinary approach.

The AI + Society Initiative aims at defining problems and identifying solutions to essential issues related to ethical AI and technology development. The research leverages a transdisciplinary approach to advance AI methods and tools, with a focus on their responsible applications. 

The Initiative promotes an inclusive research agenda with a specific focus on avoiding the amplification of global digital injustices through AI for affected communities. The research will include many important voices such as women, youth, seniors, Indigenous People, LGBTQIA2S+, visible minorities, people with disabilities, and linguistic minorities – and those at the intersection of these identities.

Coordination:  Florian Martin-Bariteau

Often associated with cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based technologies are quickly working their way into every aspect of the Canadian legal landscape. Blockchain-based technologies link lists of records (called blocks) across multiple computers so that records cannot be retroactively altered.  These technologies are increasingly permeating the legal world, providing new opportunities to providers of legal services through innovative uses such as smart contracts. Law firms and lawyers are continuously adapting to market trends in an effort to remain competitive and to provide value to clients. But as is often the case with new technologies, law has difficulty keeping up with the innovations. As a result, the legal framework surrounding smart contracts is still murky. 

The Ottawa Blockchain Legal Lab conducts research on blockchain and decentralized ledgers, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and more.

Lead: Florian Martin-Bariteau

Boasting nearly 50 professors from the Common Law and Civil Law Sections of the Faculty of Law, the Law and Social Justice Group engages in analysis and critique of the role of law in the development and maintenance of social, political and economic inequality. This critical perspective focuses in particular on historically marginalized groups such as women; those facing socio-economic disadvantage; immigrants and refugees; linguistic, ethnic, religious and racial minorities; aboriginal peoples; those with mental and physical disabilities; sexual minorities; the young and the aged.  Social Justice professors offer courses that critically examine law’s implication in constructing and maintaining historic and current social, political and economic inequalities, and law’s potential and limitations as an instrument of redistributive and egalitarian social, economic and political change.

The University of Ottawa Community Legal Clinic’s mandate is two-fold: (1) provide free bilingual legal services to low-income members of the Ottawa community and to undergraduate students, and (2) provide experiential learning to law students enrolled in the Faculty of Law, Common Law Section under the supervision of staff lawyers. Law students work as frontline caseworkers at the Clinic and gain important practical legal skills and court/tribunal experience while contributing significantly to the Ottawa community.

The Clinic provides public legal education on a variety of legal topics and legal information, advice, and representation to individuals facing criminal and/or quasi-criminal charges, family law issues, and tenant-related matters.

Director: Jasna Drnda

Executive Director (interim):  Sonia Ouellet

The uOttawa-Ecojustice Environmental Law Clinic fills a major gap in Canada’s environmental capacity with a long-needed public interest environmental law organization in the nation’s capital.  It is well-positioned to serve the environmental law and policy interests of both local and national clientele, including environmental, aboriginal and community groups in both official languages. The clinic draws on the University’s strengths in environmental law, and related fields such as economics, science and public health, and on Ecojustice’s strengths in law, policy and science.  Conceived as a problem-based educational model, the Clinic is helping to train the next generation of environmental law and policy leaders, while encouraging students and faculty to become more involved in community service work.

Director:  Josh Ginsberg

The members of the Clinic team work in collaboration with equality seeking groups, legal clinics and not-for-profit organisations on test case litigation, interventions, appeals and law reform initiatives. The team has defended the rights of its clients before various administrative tribunals, every level of Canadian courts and international treaty bodies.