Michele is a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Faculty of Law. Graduating with a PhD from Queen’s Law in 2023, she served for almost four decades as a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Community Advocacy & Legal Centre, a non-profit community legal clinic in Belleville, Ontario. As a Visiting Scholar she pursues several research and writing projects. The first advances her doctoral research findings on the importance of cultivating integrative reflective practice as an essential meta-competency for legal professionals and contributes to enhancing legal education pedagogy by introducing and requiring it. Other projects advance people-centred justice in response to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 16.3. This includes anticipating and envisioning a more robust professional competency framework and profile for 21st century lawyers. Michele also explores the potential of health justice partnerships as a transformative access to justice intervention and strategy.

Working with her former PhD co-supervisor Prof. Sharry Aiken and Queen’s Law staff, Michele recently co-organized an International Symposium Series on Reflective Practice for Legal Professionals. This five-event series involved more than 150 presenters across 12 countries advancing the theory and pedagogy of reflective inquiry and practice in law, with more than 80 speakers hosted at the Queen’s Law virtual symposium June 22 – 24, 2026. Related initiatives now include developing the Series website to mobilize knowledge about how to cultivate and implement reflective practice in law. The website preserves presentations from all five Series events, and will include Session recordings and transcripts from the Queen’s Law’s symposium. Useful resources are being curated and uploaded to the website. Michele and Prof. Aiken are guest editing special dedicated issues of The Law Teacher and the Legal Education Review. These international, peer-reviewed journals will be published in 2027 and include dozens of papers produced for the Series. A final evaluative report about the Series, which had been organized with the support of law teacher associations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, will be issued early 2027. This report will recommend next steps based on collected feedback from participants and presenters involved with the Series and will be widely circulated.

Drawing on her empirical and comparative research, extensive cross-disciplinary and cross-jurisdictional literature review, and her experience as a community lawyer, non-profit leader, and access to justice advocate, Michele continues to offer seminars/workshops about reflective practice at events in Canada and internationally.

Her interdisciplinary research also examines collaborations between legal and health professionals designed to increase access to justice for marginalized communities. Her 2024 background paper on the impact of justice and health partnerships in four countries included a scoping review with Queen’s University Department of Family Medicine, published in 2023, and a 2019 mapping study of Ontario’s health justice partnerships (HJPs). She has presented on this research and its implications in forums that include the OECD Global Roundtable on Equal Access to Justice, and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime. She recently published a paper on how to implement these partnerships as part of the Justice Data Observatory’s compendium “Global Perspectives on People-Centered Justice: Exploring the Evidence”.

Michele works with members of Ontario’s HJP Community of Practice – a collaborative for which she was a founding member in 2016 – to advance these partnerships. She has been helping to organize the first-ever Canadian Championing Health Justice Partnerships conference September 22 and 23, 2026 in Toronto, as part of an initiative funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario.

She holds a Master of Adult Education from St. Francis Xavier University, and BA and law degrees from Western University. She was a Law Foundation of Ontario Community Leadership in Justice Fellow (2009) at Osgoode Hall Law School (York University), a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University (2014, 2017), and Bond University (2017). She has been a member of the International Legal Aid Group and has also worked with the Open Society Justice Initiative, Ukraine’s International Renaissance Foundation, and Namati to provide training on legal empowerment, community lawyering, community legal clinics, and paralegals in international forums. When she was a member of the Canadian Bar Association’s Access to Justice Committee, she chaired its Legal Education Working Group and helped to produce an Experiential Learning Guide “Learning Law in Place” for Canadian law students. In 2022, she was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada for her work on access to justice.

Michele received numerous scholarships during her PhD studies. She was also awarded the inaugural Queen’s Law Graduate Student Programs Prize in 2023. Her dissertation “Integrative Reflective Practice in Canada and Australia: Enhancing Legal Education, Pedagogy, and Professionalism,” was the 2023 Queen’s Law Outstanding Thesis.

Publications:

Refereed contributions

Other refereed contributions

Non-refereed contributions