At the 2020 CALE/ACEJ annual conference, we presented our annual awards.

The first award presented was the CALE/ACEJ Best Paper Award for an outstanding paper written by an emerging scholar in the field of legal ethics. Papers submitted for this award are assessed based on their originality, the thoroughness of their research and analysis, and the extent to which they advance thinking on topics of importance in the field, nationally or internationally.

We are pleased to announce that Deanne Sowter was this year’s award recipient for her paper “The Future Harm Exception: Coercive Control as Serious Psychological Harm and the Challenge for Lawyers’ Ethics” This research for this paper was supported by the 2019/20 OBA Foundation Chief Justice of Ontario Fellowship in Legal Ethics and Professionalism Studies. The question that Deanne asks in this paper is whether a lawyer can use the future harm exception to prevent her client from coercively controlling his former spouse. Congratulations to Deanne!

The second award presented was the CALE/ACEJ Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is meant to recognize sustained accomplishments in the field of legal ethics and professionalism by a member of CALE/ACEJ.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of this award is Richard Devlin. Richard Devlin was one of the founders of CALE/ACEJ. He co-hosted the very first CALE/ACEJ conference at Dalhousie University in 2006 along with Jocelyn Downie, which was attended by about 15 people. CALE/ACEJ was officially created four years later, and the first official meeting was held at ILEC IV in Banff in 2012. Richard served as the founding President of CALE/ACEJ (2011-2015) and he is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors (2015-Present). In short, throughout CALE/ACEJ’s lifetime Richard has been involved in a leadership capacity.

His contributions to teaching and scholarship in the area of legal ethics have been and continue to be profound. Richard is a regular speaker on issues related to legal ethics, with a particular emphasis on judicial ethics, and he has published over 100 papers, chapters, and essays since 1985.

As one of the letters in submitted in support of Richard’s award stated:

“I genuinely believe that Richard deserves the Lifetime Achievement Award for not just sustained accomplishments but rather for sustained, extraordinary, catalytic, and transformative accomplishments in the field of legal ethics and professionalism”

Those who nominated Richard for the award also emphasized the time and care he has taken to mentor junior members of the legal ethics academic community. His nominators wrote:

“As a matter of common practice, Richard takes the time to reach out and support members of the community when they face difficult challenges within the academy, and when they need to make difficult decisions. He is always there. He also takes the time to read our work and provide thoughtful feedback, even when the world is quite literally upside down and he has an otherwise onerous list of things on his plate.”

So many of us have benefited from Richard’s mentorship and collegiality. Congratulations, Richard!