Justice Joyce DeWitt-Van Ousten, '91 LLB, of the Supreme Court of British Columbia has been appointed to the Court of Appeal for British Columbia and a judge ex-officio of the Court of Appeal of Yukon.
DeWitt-Van Ousten has served on the Supreme Court of B.C. since 2016, and was assistant deputy attorney general for the B.C. Prosecution Service from 2012 to 2016.
She began working for the Prosecution Service in 1994, both as a trial prosecutor and an appellate prosecutor, and led a specialized unit focused on Charter litigation.
Throughout her career, DeWitt-Van Ousten has been active in legal education, teaching criminal procedure at the University of Victoria in the early 2000s.
She is currently the co-chair of the National Criminal Law Program, Federation of Law Societies of Canada, and co-chair of a course in Charter litigation with the National Judicial Institute. From 2007 to 2016, she was co-editor of the Working Manual of Criminal Law.
She became a Queen's Counsel in 2010, and received the Canadian Bar Association (BC Branch) Georges A. Goyer QC Memorial Award for her contributions to the legal profession in 2012.