CALE/ACEJ is delighted to announce that Justice Alice Woolley has been chosen as the recipient of the CALE Lifetime Achievement Award for this year.

Justice Woolley was one of the founding directors of CALE/ACEJ in 2012, which held its first official meeting at ILEC IV in Banff in 2012. In 2012, she was appointed Vice-President of CALE/ACEJ, a position she held until 2015, when she became President. Justice Woolley resigned from her role as President in January 2019, following her appointment to the bench.

In her roles with CALE/ACEJ, Justice Woolley helped to promote and connect the Canadian legal ethics community to the broader international legal ethics community. Her hard work and skillful leadership led to the successful hosting in 2012 of the fifth biennial International Legal Ethics Conference in Banff, Alberta – the first and only time this conference, which attracts hundreds of legal ethics scholars from around the world, was held in Canada. Her participation in international conferences and workshops, in addition to her role as President of the International Association of Legal Ethics built further bridges between the Canadian and international legal ethics communities.

As an academic, Justice Woolley’s contributions to legal ethics scholarship are quite significant. In addition to numerous law journal articles, Alice is the author of the important text, Understanding Lawyers’ Ethics in Canada and the co-editor and co-author of the leading casebook on legal ethics in Canada, Lawyers’ Ethics and Professional Regulation. As one of the authors of a supporting reference letter to her nomination for this award stated: “Only a very few scholars on the international scene have comparably broad and ambitious research interest” and described her “scholarship to be sharp, rigorous, and above all utterly intolerant of platitudes and lazy thinking.” As another referee summed up: “In terms of ‘re-defining’ the field, Justice Woolley is recognized as the most prominent, influential and prolific modern legal ethics scholar in Canada.”

In her role as a legal educator, Justice Woolley was a leader in bringing problem-based learning to the teaching of legal ethics and in innovating with a “flipped classroom” model. Her dedication and skill in teaching was recognized institutionally at the University of Calgary, with her two-time receipt of the Howard Tidswell Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.

Importantly, Justice Woolley did not confine her public service and intellectual contributions to only the academic sphere. While an academic, she wrote 100 blog posts on ABlawg and Slaw between December 2007 and July 2018 which engaged with a variety of legal ethics and judicial ethics questions and were widely read by lawyers and lawyer regulators in addition to academics.

On more personal notes, her referees wrote, among other things “one of Alice’s signal qualities as a scholar, which is her lack of ego and her unfailing generosity regarding the work of others” and that “through all of her incredible professional efforts and accomplishments – Justice Woolley has remained a grounded, modest and reliable friend.”

This award is meant to “to recognize sustained accomplishments in the field of legal ethics and professionalism by a member of CALE/ACEJ”. Through her leadership with CALE/ACEJ, her academic scholarship and public service, Justice Woolley is extremely deserving of this recognition. To use the words of one of the referees for this award: “I cannot imagine a member of CALE, or in fact any member – past or present – of our Canadian legal ethics community who better fits this description.”