Law Foundation of Ontario Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship

Elizabeth Shilton was appointed the Law Foundation of Ontario Senior Fellow at the CLCW on February 1st, 2011. As a Senior Fellow with extensive experience in the field, Elizabeth contributes valuable expertise to the Centre. Her postdoctoral work in gender and pension reform will contribute vitally to the CLCW research programme.

Elizabeth Shilton holds an LLM from Harvard and an SJD from the University of Toronto. She was a founding partner of Cavalluzzo Hayes Shilton McIntyre & Cornish, a Toronto-based law firm specializing in union-side labour law. She practiced there for many years, where she advised unions in both the public and private sector on labour and employment law issues, including human rights and constitutional law, and appeared before administrative tribunals and courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada, in significant cases involving employment and equality rights. She was one of the first lawyers certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a Labour Law Specialist. She has published and spoken widely on education labour and employment law and on workplace human rights issues. She taught labour, employment and collective bargaining law as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Osgoode Hall Law School, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Osgoode’s Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. Elizabeth is also a member of the Ontario Financial Services Tribunal

Most recently, Elizabeth’s research interests have focused on domestic and comparative employment pension policy and related issues of economic security. Her SJD thesis traces the evolution of employment pension plans from gratuities provided at an employer’s discretion to terms of the contract of employment, arguing that while pension plans are now formally recognized as establishing employee rights, the current legal framework does not provide employees with the tools to influence the content of those rights or to enforce them effectively. Her current research project focuses on gender and pension reform, exploring gender inequality in Canada’s current retirement income system, the role played by law and legal institutions in constructing and reinforcing that inequality, and the potential for equality-driven law reform. She teaches an Advanced Labour Law seminar at Queens on Human Rights in the Workplace.

Faculty of Law
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
K7L 3N6

Tel: 416-461-5254
e-mail: shiltone@queensu.ca