Welcoming New Collaborators: Professors Michelle Lawrence and Micah Rankin

We have been expanding our collaborations at Robson Crim. Since we started in July of 2016, we have been committed to fostering criminal law, criminal justice and criminology research throughout Canada. Our blawg offerings continue to expand and our peer-reviewed annual journal is in process for its second edition. The addition of two new fabulous scholars to our collaborator team will help to make our bawg offerings and our journal stronger still. We are delighted to welcome Professors Michelle Lawrence and Micah Rankin to the fold! Welcome aboard!! To learn more about Professors Lawrence and Rankin, see below. This is great holiday news for all of us at Robson Crim!

Professor Michelle Lawrence teaches and researches in criminal law, sentencing, and the law of evidence.

She explores the intersection of the criminal justice, mental health, and family law systems, as well as in the development of empirical measures for use in adjudicative proceedings and in aid of law reform. She practiced law as a partner in the Litigation Department of McCarthy Tétrault LLP. She is an Associate Director of the FREDA Research Centre on Violence Against Women & Children and Co-Chair of the UVic Child Care Advisory Board.

She has worked to launch and develop the Access to Justice Centre for Excellence at the University of Victoria. Professor Lawrence holds graduate degrees in law and criminology, including an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. (Criminology) from Simon Fraser University and completed her doctoral work as a Trudeau Scholar.

Professor Micah Rankin is one the founding members of Thompson Rivers University law. He obtained his first law degree at the University of Victoria. He went on to clerk with the BC Court of Appeal. He articled with Mr. Joe Arvay, QC, one of Canada’s leading constitutional lawyers; and practiced civil litigation at Hunter Litigation Chambers, a leading civil litigation boutique.

He left practice in 2010 to pursue an LLM at the University of Toronto. His past research has focused on judicial independence, access to justice, the law of evidence and empirical trends in criminal sentencing. More recently, he has begun to conduct research in the area of regulatory law, heuristics in judicial decision-making, and legal ethics. He has published peer reviewed articles in numerous journals. He regularly assists as counsel in public interest cases and on criminal appeals.