Lorraine E. Weinrib was appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Department of Political Science in 1988. Previously, she worked in the Crown Law Office - Civil, Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario), holding the position of Deputy Director of Constitutional Law and Policy at the time of her departure. Her work included legal advice and policy development on constitutional issues, as well as extensive litigation, frequently in the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1993, Professor Weinrib was Visiting Professor (Fulbright Fellowship) at the University of Michigan Law School; in 1994 at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Halbert Academic Exchange); and in 2001 and 2002 at the Tel Aviv Faculty of Law. She also spent a month at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1994, a visit that included the opportunity to deliver the Oliver Schreiner Memorial Lecture. She holds law degrees from Yale and Toronto, and an undergraduate degree from York University.
Professor Weinrib teaches the first year constitutional law course as well as advanced courses on the Charter, constitutional litigation, and comparative constitutional law. Her writing, in which she advocates the institutional coherence of the Charter, includes articles on the interpretation of sections 1 and 33, the theoretical dimension of the Supreme Court of Canada's Charter jurisprudence, the process leading up to the 1982 amendments to the Constitution, and studies of leading cases, e.g., Morgentaler (abortion), Ford (override), Keegstra (hate promotion) and Rodriguez (assisted suicide). She has also written on the topic of women in the legal profession. Her current work focusses on the legitimacy of the post-WWII model of judicially enforced rights-protection, of which Canada's Charter is both an example and a model for other countries' constitutional development. In addition, Professor Weinrib has published essays on the special contribution that the Canadian Jewish Community has made to the protection of rights in the lead up to the adoption of the Charter as well as in public engagement and the support of test cases in the past 20 years.
Professor Weinrib is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Supreme Court of Canada in the Age of Rights.
In 2006, Prof. Weinrib was featured in a special exhibit as one of the Law School's Women Trailblazers.
