We're very pleased to announce the 2025 Bora Laskin Award recipient is Adelle Blackett, one of the most highly esteemed labour law scholars in Canada and internationally.
Currently on public service leave to the International Labour Organization as Senior Advisor to the Director-General, she is Professor of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and the Founding Director of the Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory. An elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Advocate Emeritus of the Barreau du Québec and recipient of the Christine Tourigny Award of Merit, she has also been awarded honorary doctorates in law from Queen’s University, Université catholique de Louvain, and Simon Fraser University, and received the global Labour Law Research Network’s Bob Hepple Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labour Law.
Professor Blackett is widely published in the field of transnational labour law, with a focus on emancipatory approaches. Much of her research is at the interface between trade and labour standards, where she calls for a “social regionalism” that fosters transnational spaces for redistributive labour governance and voice. In addition, she is widely published on domestic workers’ rights and is the recipient of the Canadian Council on International Law’s Scholarly Book Award for Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law. Her most recent co-edited volume, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Slavery: on the presence of the past, is the result of her International Academy of Comparative Law General Rapporteurship. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship.
Professor Blackett has made meaningful public policy contributions. Internationally, she was the lead expert in an ILO treaty-making process on decent work for domestic workers, and prepared a draft Haitian labour code in a highly consultative tripartite-plus process. She served on the Québec Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse for 7 years, and chaired the federal Human Rights Experts Panel of the Court Challenges Programme. She chaired Canada’s Employment Equity Act Review Task Force, and her comprehensive report, A Transformative Framework to Achieve and Sustain Employment Equity, was publicly released with Ministerial commitments to law reform. She is the principal drafter of the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education, which has been signed by close to sixty institutions of higher education in Canada.
A beloved teacher and mentor, she was awarded the McGill Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching in recognition of her core courses in labour law and employment law, her pedagogical innovation on Law and Development, Slavery and the Law and Transnational Labour Law, and her support to a new generation of labour law scholars in Québec, Canada and abroad.
The award will be presented to Adelle at a dinner on Tuesday, December 9. For more information or to reserve a space, please contact customerservice@lancasterhouse.com.
The Bora Laskin Award was established in 2003 by the University of Toronto Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources in cooperation with Lancaster House, publishers of information on labour, employment and human rights for over 30 years. The award is named after the late Chief Justice Bora Laskin (1912-1984) who, before joining the Supreme Court of Canada, was pre-eminent as a labour law scholar and labour arbitrator.
Nominees are considered from all fields relating to labour law, including, for example, academia, private practice, courts, tribunals, and arbitration.
Award Committee Members:
- Chris Albertyn, Albertyn Arbitration, Toronto
- Ginette Brazeau, Mediator/Arbirtrator and former Chair, Canada Industrial Relations Board
- Justice Emily Burke, Supreme Court of British Columbia
- Brian Burkett, Fasken LLP, Toronto
- Professor Renée-Claude Drouin, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
- Professor Kerry Rittich, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
- Tom Roper, Roper Greyell LLP, Vancouver
- Rebecca Saturley, KC, Stewart McKelvey, Halifax
- Professor Daphne Taras, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan University
- The Honourable Warren K. Winkler, former Chief Justice of Ontario
Chair: Rafael Gomez, Professor and Director, Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, University of Toronto
