Overview

Kent Roach

Kent Roach, CM, FRSC, is a professor of law at the University of Toronto. He formerly served as a law clerk to the late Justice Bertha Wilson. He has been editor-in-chief of the Criminal Law Quarterly since 1998. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada by his fellow academics. In 2015, he was appointed a member of the Order of Canada. In 2017, the Canada Council awarded him the Molson Prize for his career contributions to social sciences and the humanities. He is the co-editor of Cases and Materials on Criminal Law and Procedure and numerous collections of essays, and the author of seventeen books, including Constitutional Remedies in Canada (winner of the 1997 Walter Owen Book Prize); Due Process and Victims’ Rights: The New Law and Politics of Criminal Justice (shortlisted for the 1999 Donner Prize); The Supreme Court on Trial: Judicial Activism or Democratic Dialogue (shortlisted for the 2001 Donner Prize); (with Robert J. Sharpe) Brian Dickson: A Judge’s Journey (winner of the 2003 Defoe Prize); The 9/11 Effect: Comparative Counter-Terrorism (co-winner of the 2012 Mundell Medal); (with Craig Forcese) False Security: The Radicalization of Canadian Anti-Terrorism (winner of the 2016 Canadian Law and Society book prize); and Canadian Justice, Indigenous Injustice: The Gerald Stanley and Colten Boushie Case (finalist for the 2019 Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing). He is the author (with Robert J Sharpe) of the Canadian Charter of Rights Freedoms volume in Irwin’s Essentials in Law series with a 7th edition published in 2021. His most recent books are Remedies for Human Rights Violations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, and Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change, published by Delve Publishing and Irwin Law in 2022. Professor Roach has served as research director of the Commission of Inquiry into the Bombing of Air India, the Goudge Inquiry into Forensic Pathology, the Independent Review of the Toronto Police’s Missing Person Investigations, which resulted in Missing and Missed (2021), and the Criminal Cases Review Commission Consultations, which resulted in A Miscarriages of Justice Commission (2021). He was also volume lead on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s volume five on the legacy of Residential Schools for Indigenous children, which was published in 2015. Acting pro bono, he has represented civil liberties and Indigenous groups in interventions before the Supreme Court, including in Golden and Ward on strip searches; Khawaja on terrorism; Latimer on mandatory sentencing; Gladue, Ipeelee, and Anderson on sentencing Indigenous offenders; Sauve on prisoner voting rights; and Williams and Chouhan on jury selection.