The University of Alberta Faculty of Law's Professor Roderick J. Wood has been appointed as the inaugural Estey Chair in Business Law at the University of Saskatchewan's College of Law. Professor Wood will take up the one-year position on July 1, 2014. In 2012, a $2 million donation to the University of Saskatchewan helped to establish the Estey Chair in Business Law in the College of Law. The Estey Chair in Business Law is intended to attract outstanding scholars in the area of business law. Chairholders are expected to teach business law courses within the college, conduct world-class research in their field, as well as share their expertise and engage in outreach activities with the wider legal community.
"I am deeply honoured to be able to serve as the inaugural Estey Chair in Business Law," said Professor Roderick Wood. "I recall that as a law student at the College of Law in the late 1970s, Justice Estey came to the law school and spoke to a packed audience of law students and faculty members. I have been researching and teaching in commercial law for over 25 years at the University of Alberta Law Faculty, and I welcome the generous opportunity provided by the Estey Chair to be able to pursue my research in a more sustained level and to transmit this knowledge to aspiring lawyers through my teaching at the College of Law and to the wider legal community through outreach activities."
Professor Roderick Wood is currently the F.R. (Dick) Matthews Q.C. Professor of Business Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the areas of secured transactions law, commercial law, bankruptcy and insolvency law, and debtor-creditor law. He has co-authored books on secured transactions law in Canada and New Zealand, is the author of a treatise on Canadian bankruptcy and insolvency law, and has written over two dozen articles in various law journals. He is the 2004 recipient of the Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award for the Faculty of Law, a 2005 recipient of the AC Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Alberta, and a 2006 recipient of a McCalla Professorship for his contribution to research in law at the University of Alberta.
Professor Wood has served as Associate Dean (1997 to 1999) at the University of Alberta Law Faculty, as Board Member of the Alberta Law Reform Institute (1997 to 2001), and as Commissioner of the Law Commission of Canada (2001 to 2006). Professor Wood was a member of the Canadian delegation at Diplomatic Conferences in Luxembourg in 2007 and Berlin in 2012 that produced international instruments governing the secured financing of rail assets and space assets, and was a member of the drafting committee that produced the text of the Luxembourg Protocol to the Unidroit Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment.
"I am absolutely thrilled to return to the University of Saskatchewan," said Professor Wood. "I have a deep and enduring connection to my hometown of Saskatoon and to the College of Law. I obtained my LL.B. from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980, and it was there that I first began to teach law courses in commercial transactions as a sessional lecturer at the College of Law from 1985 to 1987. It was this highly positive experience that ultimately led me to seek an academic position at the University of Alberta. It was also while I was working in Saskatchewan that I first began my collaboration with Professor Ronald Cuming with the publication of the first in a series of PPSA handbooks in 1987. This collaboration of almost three decades, culminating in the publication by Irwin Law in 2012 of the second edition of Cuming, Walsh and Wood, Personal Property Security Law, has been enormously rewarding to me."
The University of Alberta Faculty of Law would like to wish Professor Roderick Wood all the very best for his one-year term at the University of Saskatchewan as the Estey Chair, and to let him know that he will be much missed by his U of A Law School colleagues, staff, and students during this period.