Two Western Law professors appointed to the bench
December 15, 2014
In an unprecedented move, two Western Law professors have been tapped for judicial appointments on the same day.
Grant Huscroft
Professor Grant Huscroft will serve on the Ontario Court of Appeal and Professor Bradley Miller will sit on the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
“These prestigious appointments are a great honour and reflection on the strength and depth of the public law scholarship and academic program at Western Law,” says Western Law Dean Iain Scott.
“They both have made major contributions to important constitutional law issues. They’ve been tremendous colleagues and I know they will contribute greatly in their new public service roles,” Scott adds.
Grant Huscroft and Bradley Miller established the Public Law and Legal Philosophy Research Group at Western together in 2008. The group attracted some of the world’s top legal scholars to Western to collaborate on projects related to constitutional interpretation, judicial reasoning, and philosophy of law.
Bradley Miller
It engaged the broader community through public forums on hot button issues like euthanasia, prostitution, and polygamy, and led Western’s pre-eminent public law lecture series, The Coxford Lecture.
“We’re very proud that two such highly esteemed legal scholars from Western have been appointed to the bench and we wish them well in this exciting new chapter of their careers,” says Western University President Amit Chakma.
Both Huscroft and Miller have published widely in Constitutional Law and Constitutional Theory. Additionally, Huscroft is a noted Administrative Law scholar.
They are the editors (along with Professor Grégoire Webber) of Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning, recently published by Cambridge University Press and The Challenge of Originalism: Theories of Constitutional Interpretation (CUP 2011). Huscroft also edited Expounding the Constitution: Essays in Constitutional Theory (CUP 2008), his first collaboration with Miller.
"It was a pleasure to work in public law at Western, and a privilege to have worked with so many fine scholars and students over my academic career," says Huscroft.
“Western has provided a fantastic platform for engagement in public law and I’m enormously proud of the work we have done over the past 10 years,” says Miller. “I’ll miss the seminars and lectures and the enthusiasm of students working out problems. But the London court has a strong tradition of supporting the law school, and I hope to be part of that.”
Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at Western in 2002, Huscroft was a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Auckland (1992-2001) and a visiting professor at McGill Faculty of Law in 1998.
He received his BA from Western University in 1981 and an LLB from Queen's in 1984. He holds an LLM from the University of Auckland and is a Member of the Ontario Bar and New Zealand Bar. He served as an adjudicator with the Health Professions Appeal Review Board and the Health Services Appeal Review Board from 2008-2014.
Bradley Miller was awarded a doctorate in law from Oxford University in 2004 and an LLM (with distinction) from the University of Edinburgh in 1994. He received a B,Com and LL.B. from the University of British Columbia in 1992. Since joining Western’s Faculty of Law in 2005, he was a visiting fellow in law at the European University Institute in Florence, a visiting associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University, and was the 2012-13 Ann and Herbert W. Vaughan Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
He was an associate counsel with Miller Thomson LLP and practiced constitutional litigation and complex commercial litigation with Lerners LLP in Toronto.
The Court of Appeal is composed of 23 judges who hear over 1,500 appeals each year, on issues of private law, constitutional law, criminal law, administrative law, and other matters. The Superior Court of Justice is a trial court of inherent jurisdiction in all civil and criminal matters. It is the largest superior court in Canada, with a complement of over 300 judges.
