Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant will formally launch the Law Commission of Ontario and introduce its new executive director, Patricia Hughes, at a ceremony and reception tomorrow at 10am at York’s Osgoode Hall Law School.
Hughes, who will start her four-year term on Sept. 15, served as dean of the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law from 2001 to 2006. More recently, she was executive director of education (Alberta) and scholar-in-residence at Bennett Jones LLP in Calgary. A professor in the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Law from 1992 to 2001, Hughes also served as a tribunal adjudicator and in 
the Policy Development Division of the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.
Left: Patricia Hughes
Announced last fall by Bryant, the Law Commission will operate independently of government to recommend law reforms to improve the administration of Ontario’s justice system, and enhance access to justice. The commission’s offices will be housed temporarily in the Computer Methods Building on the Keele campus, then moved to Osgoode Hall Law School once a renovation and expansion project is completed there.
The Law Commission, which is headed by a board of governors, is a partnership among the deans of Ontario’s six law schools (Osgoode, University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Law, University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law, University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, Queen’s University’s Faculty of Law and University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law), as well as the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General and the Law Foundation of Ontario.
For more on the Law Commission of Ontario, see the Dec. 13, 2006 issue of YFile.