New Faculty of Law appointee and Harvard Law School SJD candidate Jessica Eisen
There'll be another new Faculty member officially taking up residence at UAlberta Law this fall.
Jessica Eisen, who is currently completing her SJD at Harvard University, will become an assistant professor at the Faculty as of July 1, 2018. She will be joined by two other accomplished scholars, Dr. Jennifer Raso and Dr. Peter Szigeti, who will also start as assistant professors for the 2018 fall semester. At the conclusion of the current hiring cycle, nearly one-third of UAlberta Law's Faculty members will be new hires since 2016.
Eisen brings with her an impressive academic background, with an academic focus on law and social change in the area of animal agriculture.
"We're thrilled to welcome Jessica Eisen to our Faculty," said UAlberta Law Dean Paul Paton.
"In addition to her international reputation in the area of animal law, Eisen is also already an accomplished scholar in fields ranging from constitutional law to labour and anti-discrimination law. She is a committed teacher and is committed to service within and beyond the Faculty. She will help further position UAlberta Law as a global leader in animal law, an academic domain that was barely on the map a generation ago but is now a magnet for groundbreaking research."
"Her appointment also allows for closer cross-disciplinary collaboration with the Faculty of Agricultural Life and Environmental Sciences, a natural and exciting fit given our place in Alberta and the increasing importance of legal dimensions to the issues scholars at ALES are exploring."
Prior to undertaking her doctoral work at Harvard, Eisen completed an LLM at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, a JD at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and a BA in political science and human rights studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Her work has been published in the Journal of Law and Equality, the Animal Law Review, the Canadian Journal of Poverty Law, Transnational Legal Theory and ICON: The International Journal of Constitutional Law, and has covered topics ranging from Canadian and comparative constitutional equality law to legal dimensions of human-animal relationships.
Although Eisen is a member of the Ontario Bar and has practiced in the areas of human rights law, employment law and civil litigation, her true passion is for teaching and research.
"Legal academia offers a unique opportunity to blend honest, wide-ranging, creative inquiry with practical attention to pressing questions of immediate social importance. While an advocate is bound to represent a particular position, a scholar is really invited to delve deeply into all sides of a question. But because legal academia is always tethered to legal practice and force, it is always accountable to 'real life', which makes it so exciting and so important," said Eisen.
Eisen's fields of study include equality law, comparative constitutional law, feminist legal theory and law and social movements, but one of her primary areas of research focuses on the legal treatment of farmed animals in industry-scale operations and the exploration of social justice problems related to human-animal relationships.
Eisen says the ethical treatment of animals is a polarizing issue and a social problem often debated by activist groups on opposing sides of the spectrum, but according to her, Canadian animal law scholarship is among the "most innovative and compelling in the growing global conversation about animals and law."
Although Eisen's legal academic work has taken her to some of the most prestigious law programs in North America, UAlberta Law's forward-thinking approach to research and learning, along with a rich and varied community of constitutional scholars, has her excited to begin.
"The University of Alberta Faculty of Law is becoming a hub for the study of animals and the law. Professors Peter Sankoff and Cameron Jefferies have been working on important questions relating to the ways that criminal law and environmental law, respectively, impact animals. My own research has explored the place of animals in constitutional theory, and has applied feminist and critical lenses to better understand the ways that law shapes animal agriculture. I am eager to contribute to UAlberta Law's burgeoning animal law research community, while also connecting with the impressive scholars working on human-animal studies and critical animal studies in other departments at the University," said Eisen.
However, scholarly research won't be her sole focus. By teaching, Eisen's hope is to empower and equip a new generation of lawyers with the resources and tools needed to succeed in their chosen careers.
"Lawyering is a profession that certainly requires a level of technical competence and expertise, but it is also a profession that requires creativity, empathy and trustworthiness. I hope my students will learn to see all these attributes as essential and interconnected, and to carry that lesson forward into their professional careers, not only as lawyers, but also as mentors to the generations that will follow them," said Eisen.