Plenary Session 2

Donna E. Young is the inaugural dean of the Faculty of Law at Ryerson University. Before assuming her deanship, she was the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School and a joint faculty member at the University at Albany’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her teaching and scholarship focus on law and inequality, race and gender discrimination, and academic freedom and university governance. She has taught courses in Criminal Law, Employment Law; U.S. Federal Civil Procedure; Gender and Work; and Race, Rape Culture, and Law.

Dean Young is much sought after as a speaker and has been invited to present her work at conferences and other venues around the world. She has been a staff member at the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, in Washington, D.C. and was a member of the AAUP's Committee A, the preeminent national body setting standards and investigating academic freedom disputes in the United States. She has been a Fellow at Cornell Law School's Gender, Sexuality, and Family Project; a Visiting Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School's Institute of Feminist Legal Studies; an Associate in Law at Columbia Law School; a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Law at Roma Tre University in Rome, Italy; and a consultant to the International Development Law Organization for whom she traveled to Uganda to conduct field research on the relationship between gender inequality and law in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Dean Young was an articling student at Cornish Roland, a labour law firm in Toronto; at the Ontario Human Rights Commission; and at the Legal Department of the City of New York, Mayor's Office of Labor Relations. She is admitted to practice in New York State.

Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz was admitted to the Ontario Bar in 1980. He is a Fellow of The Insolvency Institute of Canada, a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and a member of INSOL International and The International Insolvency Institute. He is an editor of the Canadian Bankruptcy Reports.

Prior to his appointment to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2005, CJ Morawetz was consistently recognized as a top-tier practitioner of restructuring and insolvency law, in both Canadian and international publications. Since his appointment to the Court in 2005, CJ Morawetz has been based in Toronto hearing civil, commercial and Divisional Court matters. He served as Team Leader of the Commercial List from 2010-2013 at which time he was appointed Regional Senior Justice for the Toronto Region. On July 1, 2019, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.