The Tort Law and Social Equality Project (TLSE) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law has been granted leave to intervene in the upcoming Supreme Court of Canada appeal in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia.
This significant appeal will consider whether the tort of family violence should be recognized as a necessary and narrow extension of the common law, addressing constitutional values of equality and the needs of those harmed by family violence.
The hearing is scheduled for February 11 and 12, 2025, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. As is the practice for all SCC interventions, the TLSE will prepare written submissions and make its oral submissions virtually.
The TLSE, co-organized by Anthony Sangiuliano, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Law, along with New York University Professor Sophia Moreau and Queen's University Professor Jean Thomas, aims to highlight how legal rules within tort law can inadvertently perpetuate systemic social inequalities.
Their legal representatives, Hassan Ahmad (SJD 2022), Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, and Mohsen Seddigh, Partner at Sotos LLP, will present submissions on the symbolic and expressive importance of recognizing a tort of family violence at common law. They will argue that this recognition is crucial for vindicating the rights of victims and aligning common law with legislative efforts to uphold the constitutional value of equality.
"The TLSE's intervention provides an opportunity to mobilize and disseminate academic knowledge in a practical forum," said Sangiuliano. "We look forward to contributing our unique scholarly perspective on tort law and social justice issues to the Court's deliberations in Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia."
Founded in 2022 at the Faculty of Law, the TLSE aims to foster awareness of the many inadvertent ways that legal rules within tort law reinforce, and that perpetuate systemic social inequalities, which contribute to the marginalization of groups such as: racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2S+, women, and persons with disabilities. It convenes a monthly virtual Speaker Series that fosters dialogue and debate within the academic community focused on these topics and seeks to cultivate social justice tort theory as a distinctive field of inquiry.
