Property Rights and the Charter: How the Lack of a Property Rights Clause Harms Human Rights and Housing Availability

Dwight Newman, KC, DPhil (Oxford) is Professor of Law at the University of Saskatchewan, where he has been on faculty since 2005. He served the maximum two terms in a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Rights in Constitutional and International Law from 2013 to 2023. He has also served a term as Associate Dean Academic. He has over 200 publications of various types, including 15 books. His writing is regularly cited as an authority in judicial decisions, and he has been cited in at least 14 Supreme Court of Canada decisions. He has presented and published some of his work in French. He has been on academic fellowships or visitorships at a range of prestigious institutions, including Cambridge, Oxford, McGill, Princeton, l’Université de Montréal, and the University of Western Australia (UWA). He is a member of the bars of Ontario and Saskatchewan and maintains a small part-time constitutional law practice. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer and Justice Louis LeBel at the Supreme Court of Canada and has also worked for Justice Canada (seconded part of the time to the Pay Equity Task Force Secretariat) and for human rights organizations in Hong Kong and South Africa. His initial studies were in his home province of Saskatchewan (BA in Economics at Regina and JD at Saskatchewan), and he completed three graduate degrees at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (BCL, MPhil, DPhil). He recently completed two additional graduate degrees that deepen his interdisciplinary understandings and sense on the social place of law (MATS in History of Christianity and MSc in Finance and Financial Law). He has served in various board or committee roles, including at different times as Co-Chair of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Rights of Indigenous Peoples Interest Group, member of the International Law Association (ILA) Committee on the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, voting member of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) national council, Vice-President of the Canadian Law and Society Association, and member of the boards of organizations involved in public interest litigation. He has a longstanding role as a volunteer judge for the Jessup International Law Moot, judging up to advanced rounds in Washington DC, and previously competed for the Saskatchewan team (top English-language oralist in Canada, Dillard Prize for Memorials, Baxter Prize for best respondent memorial in the world). In addition to all Canadian provinces and territories, he has travelled to over 80 countries.