LLM & PhD students awarded Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarships

Doctoral students Naiomi Metallic and Lindsay Borrows, ’21 LLM, and master’s student Corinna Liu, ʼ19 JD, and Patrick Hart, ʼ03 BA, ʼ08 MA, ʼ18 PhD, ’22 LLM, each received $12,000 to support their graduate research.

The scholarships, funded by the provincial government, recognize the outstanding academic achievement of students pursuing graduate studies in Alberta.

Metallic’s doctoral research uses an inter-societal law focus to examine how Indigenous laws can be revitalized and coexist with Canadian legal orders. Her thesis is titled “Finding Spaces for Indigenous Law in Canada.”

Borrows, who specializes in Indigenous legal traditions, began her doctoral studies last fall. She examines Anishinaabe law and its intersections and diversions from "Rights of Nature" frameworks.

For his master’s project, Hart examined organized pseudolegal commercial arguments, a term used to describe a category of vexatious litigant strategies. His interdisciplinary research, which drew on law, philosophy and religious studies, looked at “the discursive gap between OPCA litigants and the courts that appears impossible for the judiciary to bridge.”

In her LLM studies, Liu examines Canada’s implementation of its obligations in the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women to end gender discrimination in the workplace, specifically the rights to equal remuneration and social security.

Patrick Hart successfully defends LLM thesis

In May 2022, Patrick Hart successfully defended his LLM thesis, “Vexatious Litigants, Meads and the Hermeticism of Law.” Hart’s supervisor, Professor Paul Paton, describes his thesis as “a deep exploration of vexatious litigants as a backdrop for reflections on the operation of legal authority and the way that outsiders to law construct narratives about the law and its authoritative place.”

The examining committee unanimously viewed both Hart’s research and his performance in defending it as excellent, calling his thesis “well written and engaging as well as analytically sound and rigorous.”

“I feel tremendously fortunate to have had the opportunity to pursue my LLM not just at the Faculty of Law at the U of A, but also under the wonderful encouragement and guidance of Professor Paton, who I first had as a teacher during my JD program at Queen's many years ago,” said Hart.

Hart will begin a PhD program in Law this fall, supervised by Paton, where he plans to build and expand on his master’s research.