The “Tort Law & Social Equality” project is organized by Sophia Moreau (New York University), Jean Thomas (Queen’s University), and Anthony Sangiuliano (University of Toronto) but involves academics, lawyers and judges working in tort law all across Canada. Our aim is to foster an awareness of the many inadvertent ways in which legal rules within tort law reinforce and perpetuate systemic social inequalities, contributing to the marginalization of groups such as racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2S+, women, and persons with disabilities. The project is generously funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
This website contains a searchable database of primary law and secondary sources relevant to tort law’s unequal impact on certain minorities. We are constantly adding to the database. If you have something you would like to add to it, please do so HERE.
The website also contains a link to a related discussion forum, which is restricted to registered participants. Academics working on related issues will be submitting short pieces here on a regular basis, and those registered may read and comment on them if they wish. If you would like to register for the discussion forum, please email us via tortlawandsocialequality@utoronto.ca.
Organizers
Sophia Moreau is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law, with an Associated Appointment in Philosophy. Her work involves both legal scholarship (in discrimination law and social justice tort theory) and philosophical scholarship (on a variety of questions in legal, moral and political philosophy). She has been HLA Hart Visiting Fellow at Oxford, Weinstein Fellow at Berkeley Law, and came to NYU from the University of Toronto, where she was Professor of Law and Philosophy.
Professor Moreau's past work includes many articles in discrimination theory, as well as her books, Faces of Inequality (OUP, winner of the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Book Prize for 2022); Litigating Equality in Canada (co-edited with Cheryl Milne, 2024); and Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law (co-edited with Deborah Hellman, 2013). Professor Moreau is in her eighth year as Associate Editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs and is a Board Member of Law and Philosophy and Legal Theory. She has done consulting work for the Canadian government and for non-profit equality-rights organizations such as L.E.A.F. (The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund). Prior to taking up her academic appointments, she clerked for Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin at the Supreme Court of Canada.
Jean Thomas is Assistant Professor of Law at Queen's University. She works in topics at the intersection of law and ethics, as well as on questions of social conventions and norms. She teaches in the area of tort law, and co-convenes the Queen’s Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy. She is the author of Public Rights, Private Relations (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of papers on the nature of rights and on the interests that tort law protects.
Anthony Sangiuliano is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and an incoming Associate Professor at Warwick Law School. He writes on the law and morality of antidiscrimination law and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has served as a judicial law clerk at the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Collaborators
Elizabeth Adjin-Tettey is Professor of Law at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of torts, remedies, insurance, critical race theory, and feminist analysis of law. She is particularly interested in issues of social marginalization in tort remedies with a special focus on personal and fatal injury damages. She is the co-author (with Ken Cooper-Stephenson) of Personal Injury Damages in Canada, 3rd ed. (Thomson Reuters, 2018); (with Jamie Cassels) Remedies: The Law of Damages, 3rd ed. (Irwin Law, 2014); and Berryman et al, Remedies: Cases and Materials, 8th ed (Emond Montgomery, 2020). Professor Adjin-Tettey won the Terry J Wuester Teaching Award in 2019.
Haim Abraham (Collaborator) is a Lecturer in Law at University College Faculty of Laws. Dr. Abraham's research and teaching interests include tort law, private law theory, liability of public actors and authorities, the intersections of private and public law, and gender and sexuality law, and he is currently examining states’ moral and legal obligations to compensate non-combatants who suffered wrongful losses during warfare and terrorism activities, using theoretical, doctrinal, and empirical lenses.