Event Description:
Come join us on November 3rd, 12:30pm, in Room 104, and hear from lawyers working in various sectors of environmental law in Vancouver.
Speaker Bios:
Erik Coates (Bennett Jones)
Erik Coates has a general corporate commercial law practice with an emphasis on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters. Erik has regulatory experience, having worked on environmental, Aboriginal and health matters, including COVID-19 regulation. He also has experience in the area of international arbitration.
Erik received an undergraduate degree in Honours, Political Science with International Relations from the University of British Columbia in 2016. He then went on to complete his JD at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, graduating in 2020. He was called to the Bar in British Columbia in 2021.
Harry Wruck, K.C. (Ecojustice)
Harry Wruck is a lawyer with Ecojustice. Previously he was the former director of the civil litigation section for the British Columbia Region Office of the federal Department of Justice. He has conducted a wide variety of complex litigation including constitutional (division of power and Charter of Rights and Freedoms), class actions and aboriginal rights cases. He has acted as a prosecutor and a civil litigator at every level of court in Canada. On behalf of Canada, he successfully pursued a multimillion dollar environmental damage claim arising from a transboundary oil pollution case before the Federal Court in Oregon. As a prosecutor, he conducted numerous environmental prosecutions under a wide variety of federal legislation. Two of the prosecutions (R. v. Fowler and R. v. Northwest Falling Contractors) were ultimately decided by the Supreme Court of Canada and continue to be the two leading constitutional decisions under the Fisheries Act.
Harry has conducted numerous trials before judges alone, as well as jury trials, and has been an extensive contributor to various continuing legal education projects. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, institutes and law schools (e.g. the National Judicial Institute, several Commonwealth law conferences, water law conferences, an international conference on transboundary pollution in Greece and the American Society of International Law, UBC, and UVIC law schools and George Washington Law School in Washington, DC). He also has written extensively on a number of environmental law subjects, including environmental assessment, the recovery of environmental damages as well as the public trust doctrine and the unwritten Constitution.
Nadia Farinelli, (Crown Counsel (BCPS))
Nadia K. Farinelli is Administrative Crown Counsel with the Commercial, Police and Regulatory Prosecutions Section of the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS). She holds a JD from the University of Victoria and two LLMs from New York University and the National University of Singapore. Prior to being called to the bar in 2008, she clerked for the BC Supreme Court and worked as an intern in Nairobi, Kenya for the Canadian Bar Association and Canadian International Development Agency. She subsequently worked for a large national law firm in its labour, employment and civil litigation group, as a Fellow for the International Centre for Transitional Justice in New York, as a Federal agent prosecutor and as in-house litigation counsel for the Greater Vancouver Regional District/Metro Vancouver. In her current role, she conducts prosecutions in the areas of environmental and regulatory law, commercial crime and police prosecutions. As Administrative Crown for environmental prosecutions, she is responsible for all environmental and animal welfare prosecutions by the BCPS.
- External Organization
- JD