Internal Constitutional Law

The Public Law Research Group welcomes Professor Vanessa MacDonnell from the University of Ottawa for their distinguished lecture.

Vanessa MacDonnell is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law (Common Law Section) and Co-Director of the uOttawa Public Law Centre. She researches in the areas of Canadian constitutional law, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law and criminal law. Between 2019 and 2024 she was an elected member of the Global Young Academy.

Vanessa’s research examines the immense but often opaque powers of the executive branch of state; the appropriate relationship between the executive, legislative and judicial branches in constitutional matters; the nature of Canada’s unwritten constitution; the promise and perils of global constitutionalism; and the phenomenon of “quasi-constitutional” legislation. Her work employs doctrinal, comparative, theoretical, and empirical approaches to generate new insights about constitutions and constitutionalism. She is currently completing a SSHRC-funded research project on quasi-constitutional legislation. She is also the Canadian Principal Investigator on a $1.7 million interdisciplinary, international research project on unwritten constitutional norms and principles, funded in Round 7 of the Open Research Area Competition.

Vanessa is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (J.D.) and Harvard Law School (LL.M.). She is currently pursuing doctoral studies at McGill University. Between 2007 and 2008 she served as a law clerk to Justice Louise Charron at the Supreme Court of Canada. Vanessa has held visiting research fellowships at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University, the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law, the University of the Witwatersrand and King's College London. In 2019 she spent six months as Scholar-in-Residence in the Constitutional, Administrative and International Law Section of the federal Department of Justice.

Vanessa teaches or has taught criminal law, evidence, constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, administrative law, a seminar on the Supreme Court of Canada, and a graduate course on the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on criminal law and procedure.