Social Justice Biography:
For the past 25 years, Sheila McIntyre has been a feminist legal activist working for egalitarian change within Canadian educational and legal institutions. Among the education and employment equity initiatives she has helped secure are anti- harassment policies and procedures, pay equity for women staff, improved disability access, anti-discrimination protection for queer students, staff and faculty, an inclusive law school curriculum and greater diversity among faculty. She also helped found and actively participated in the Women's Studies program at Queen's University. As a lawyer, she has been extensively involved pro bono in test case equality litigation, principally with the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). Throughout the 1990s, she participated with national coalitions of women's organizations to achieve three major equality-driven amendments to criminal sexual offence laws. From 2003-2005, she was Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa.
All of Professor McIntyre's scholarship seeks to unpack the dynamics of systemic inequality in law or in universities and of resistance to egalitarian change. Her most recent publications include: Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre, eds. Calling for Change: Women, Law, and the Legal Profession (2006), a collection of essays assessing the progress towards equality of women lawyers and non-lawyers who engage the legal system; and Sheila McIntyre and Sanda Rodgers, eds. Diminishing Returns: Inequality and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (2006), essays critical of the Supreme Court of Canada's application of our Constitution's equality guarantees. (A link to the complete list of her publications is forthcoming.)
Professor McIntyre has a half-time appointment and teaches only two courses a year. Her current courses are: CML 1213: Constitutional Law I, the mandatory first year course on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and CML 2315: Advanced Constitutional Law and Equality Rights which focuses on constitutional equality law, theory, ethics and strategy. One-half of the 25 places in the latter seminar are dedicated to graduate students whose work centres on social justice issues.