Congratulations to Constance Backhouse

Tonight the Canada Council awards this year’s Killam Prizes – which come with a cheque for $100,000.

The Social Sciences winner is Ottawa’s Constance Backhouse.

The testimonial reads:

One of Canada’s foremost experts on women and the law and a highly regarded scholar and human rights advocate, University of Ottawa Law Professor Constance Backhouse has garnered many distinctions and awards for her path-breaking writings on sexual harassment in the workplace and other forms of gender and race discrimination.

By showing how systemic inequality can be embedded in legal processes and decision-making, Prof. Backhouse illuminates key social justice themes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book The Secret Oppression: Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), the first to be published in Canada on this topic (the second in North America), established her reputation and led to a national round of scholarly presentations and public addresses. Her comprehensive description of women’s historical experience in law, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in 19th Century Canada (1991) won the Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History. The culmination of her work on racial discrimination in Canadian legal history, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950, was awarded the noted 2002 Joseph Brandt Award.

The University of Ottawa acknowledged Prof. Backhouse’s exceptional contribution to research and teaching by appointing her a University Research Chair and a Distinguished University Professor. Canada’s law fraternity recognized her signal contribution to the legal profession with the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for outstanding research in law (2006) and election as a “bencher” of the Law Society – an honour accorded few academic lawyers. Prof. Backhouse has also been recognized with a Bora Laskin Human Rights Fellowship (1999), a Jules and Gabrielle Léger Fellowship (2006), and a Trudeau Fellowship (2006). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Prof. Backhouse holds a BA from the University of Manitoba, an LL.B from Osgoode Hall Law School, and an LL.M from Harvard Law School.