Asian Canadian Law Students Conference 2015
Criminal/Constitutional - CSIS/Anti-Terrorism Act Panel
Marco Mendicino
Marco Mendicino prosecutes and serves as independent legal counsel to a number of regulatory bodies in both the health and financial service sectors. He has also acted for a number of other institutions on labour and human rights grievances. Marco was formerly a Federal Crown prosecutor for nearly 10 years, where he was assigned to high-profile cases, including the Toronto 18 prosecution, leading to the first convictions under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Marco also served as a Team Manager with the Investigations Department of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Between 2009 and 2012, Marco was President of the Association of Justice Counsel -- a national professional association representing the interests of nearly 3,000 federal government lawyers. He routinely speaks at conferences and is an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.
Hamish Stewart
Hamish Stewart joined the Faculty of Law in 1993 and is now a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. Before attending law school, he studied economics (B.A., University of Toronto, 1983; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1989) and taught for a year in the economics department at Williams College. He received an LL.B. degree from the University of Toronto in 1992, clerked at the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992-93, and was called to the Ontario Bar in 1998.
Professor Stewart teaches criminal law and the law of evidence, and has published numerous papers in these areas as well as papers on legal theory ,the law of contract, and economic methodology. He is the general editor of Evidence: A Canadian Casebook, 3d ed. (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2011) and an associate editor of the Canadian Criminal Cases. His most recent book isFundamental Justice (Toronto: IrwinLaw, 2012), a treatise on s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Sukanya Pillay
Sukanya Pillay is the Executive Director and General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association & Education Trust since February 2014. Sukanya has been with CCLA since 2009 when she joined to advance the organization’s work on national security and counter-terrorism. She has represented clients or presented expert evidence before administrative and judicial bodies in the US, India, Canada, and Europe, and has also represented the CCLA before the Supreme Court of Canada and before UN Treaty Bodies or Special Mechanisms.
Sukanya has worked in the public and private sectors including as a law professor at Windsor, a lawyer at international NGOs in New York and London, and as in-house counsel for a multinational organization in South Asia. Her work has focused on international human rights including trade and privacy.
She has won awards, including the Holmes-Cardozo award for Outstanding Conference Paper from the American Academy of Legal Studies in Business for a co-authored paper on genetic privacy, a research award from the University of Windsor for her documentary film and research on trade and the right to food, and in November 2013, Sukanya received the President’s Award from the South Asian Bar Association of Ontario. She has made dozens of missions to conflict zones worldwide in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and with CCLA continues to work with international civil liberties groups.