15th Annual DeLloyd J. Guth Visiting Lecture in Legal History: Presents Professor Eric Adams

In September 1945, after the end of the Second World War, 10,572 Canadians of Japanese descent faced exile to Japan – a mass banishment of unprecedented scale in Canadian history. The proposed exile was a product of law – orders enacted by cabinet under the sweeping powers of the War Measures Act. In 1946, while thousands of Japanese Canadians awaited their fates, the Supreme Court of Canada and then Judicial Committee of the Privy Council heard a reference case to determine whether banishment was legal in Canada. Could thousands of Canadians targeted on the basis of race now be forced from the country and stripped of citizenship? The exile case, in its answers, silences, and in the reaction it provoked, represents one of the most significant moments in Canadian constitutional law and history.

Speaker bio: Eric M. Adams, BA (McGill), LLB (Dalhousie), SJD (Toronto), is a Professor at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law. He served as Vice Dean at the Faculty from 2019-2022. Professor Adams publishes widely in the fields of constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights, and legal education. His multidisciplinary research engages all aspects of Canadian constitutional law, theory, and history, and includes studies of the classic cases, Christie v York, Roncarelli v Duplessis, and R v Drybones. He has won multiple awards for his teaching and research including the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Academic Excellence Award, the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History, the Provost’s Award for Early Career Teaching Excellence, best article prizes from the Canadian Association of Law Teachers and the Canadian Historical Association, and a Killam Annual Professorship for excellence in research, teaching, and service. In 2023, he received the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal for services to advanced education. He has delivered talks and keynote addresses across Canada and around the world including the Youard Lecture in Legal History at the University of Oxford. He is currently completing a book on the exile of Japanese Canadians following the Second World War. A frequent media commentator, his many editorials have appeared in newspapers across the country.