Unique in both scope and perspective, Calling for Change investigates the status of women within the Canadian legal profession ten years after the first national report on the subject was published by the Canadian Bar Association. Elizabeth Sheehy and Sheila McIntyre bring together essays that investigate a wide range of topics, from the status of women in law schools, the practising bar, and on the bench, to women's grassroots engagement with law and with female lawyers from the frontlines. Contributors not only reflect critically on the gains, losses, and barriers to change of the past decade, but also provide blueprints for political action. Academics, community activists, practitioners, law students, women litigants, and law society benchers and staff explore how egalitarian change is occurring and/or being impeded in their particular contexts. Each of these unique voices offers lessons from their individual, collective, and institutional efforts to confront and counter the interrelated forms of systemic inequality that compromise women's access to education and employment equity within legal institutions and, ultimately, to equal justice in Canada.

Sheila McIntyre was a member of the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University from 1984 to 2003. In 2003, she became a member of the Common Law Section of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa and served as the Director of the University’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre until July 2005. For twenty-five years she has been a legal activist involved in education equity struggles, test case litigation, and law reform initiatives designed to reduce systemic bias in Canadian law and legal institutions and to advance the equality of disempowered groups. She was a member of the National Legal Committee of LEAF from 1990 to 1994 and has been a member of numerous LEAF sub-committees responsible for Supreme Court of Canada facta since 1988. She has also worked with national coalitions of women’s organizations to secure equality-driven amendments to criminal sexual offence laws. The focus of her scholarship remains the analysis of systemic inequality and egalitarian change in law and the universities.

Sheila McIntyre's profile page

Elizabeth Sheehy is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. She has taught courses in criminal law and procedure, women and the law, commercial law, torts, and advanced studies in contracts and torts. As a consultant, Professor Sheehy has worked for the Department of Justice on women`s issues in criminal law, the Women`s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), and the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies on Judge Lynn Ratushny`s Self-Defence Review. With Jennie Abell, she has produced two volumes of a criminal law and procedure casebook that is in use in several law schools. She has also written articles on criminal law as it affects women, the Charter, and torts.

Elizabeth Sheehy's profile page