Professor Nicholas Bala is the 2025 recipient of the David Walter Mundell Medal, one of Ontario’s most prestigious legal honours.
He is being recognized for a career defined by influential, accessible, and reform shaping legal writing. One of Canada’s most cited legal scholars, Bala has spent close to five decades advancing how the justice system understands and responds to the needs of children, youth, and families. His work has consistently focused on promoting justice for children — ensuring their voices are heard, their vulnerabilities understood, their needs advanced, and their rights protected.
“Ensuring that the voices and interests of children are recognized in the justice system is essential — and few have done more to advance that goal for children and families than Professor Nicholas Bala,” wrote Attorney General Doug Downey in announcing this award. “His decades of research, excellence in legal writing and advocacy irrefutably stand as a testament to his distinction and make him a worthy recipient of the 2025 Mundell Medal."
Although Bala’s body of work is vast — encompassing 26 books, more than 150 journal articles, dozens of government and professional reports, and extensive contributions to public and legal education — the Mundell Medal honours not quantity, but writing that shapes the law through clarity, insight, and impact. Throughout Bala’s career, he has shared his complex multidisciplinary research in ways that influence judges, lawmakers, lawyers, and, most importantly, children and families.
“I have learned so much from doing multidisciplinary research about the impact of the justice system on children and families” Bala says. “It has been a privilege to be able to share this knowledge and help change the legal process. Winning this award is a huge honour, and reflects the value of collaborative multidisciplinary work.”
Transforming the law on child witnesses
One of Bala’s earlier and most influential contributions was his challenge to long held assumptions that child witnesses were inherently unreliable. In the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when child victims often played little part in criminal proceedings — including in cases of sexual abuse — Bala’s research exposed the flaws in the legal system’s understanding. Through collaborative Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded research with Dr. Kang Lee and other psychologists, Bala demonstrated that children could provide reliable testimony and that courtroom procedures could be modified to reduce trauma without compromising fairness. His publications, including the influential “Double Victims: Child Sexual Abuse and the Criminal Justice System” (Queen’s Law Journal), helped spur major parliamentary reforms to the Criminal Code and Evidence Act in 1988 (Bill C-15), 1993 (Bills C-126 and C-128), and 2006 (Bill C-2).
Bala’s insights have reshaped both legislation and jurisprudence. Courts across Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC), have relied on his work in landmark decisions involving vulnerable witnesses. Key SCC decisions on vulnerable child and adult witnesses include R. v. Levogiannis (1993), R. v. Find (2001), and R. v. D.A.I. (2012). One of his influential articles during this time was “A Legal & Psychological Critique of the Present Approach to the Assessment of the Competence of Child Witnesses” (Osgoode Hall Law Journal).
A national voice on children in family law
Since 2011, Bala has engaged in interdisciplinary SSHRC-funded research studying how children and their parents experience the family justice system. Traditionally, children’s voices were rarely considered in decisions affecting their futures. Bala’s research documented the benefits of safe, structured participation and guided judges, lawyers, and social workers in integrating children’s perspectives. His co authored “Children’s Voices in Family Court: Guidelines for Judges Meeting Children” (Family Law Quarterly) remains widely cited for judicial best practices.
Bala’s work also influenced major reforms to Canada’s Divorce Act in 2021, which shifted the legal framework toward child focused concepts such as “parenting time” and explicitly required courts to consider children’s views. His research on parental relocation played a significant role in shaping these reforms. One of his significant contributions on this topic was “Bringing Canada’s Divorce Act into the New Millennium: Enacting a Child-Focused Parenting Law” (Queen’s Law Journal).
Creating practical tools for judges, lawyers, and families in the courts
Between 2019 and 2021, Bala led a multidisciplinary task force to develop the Ontario Parenting Plan Guide and Template, now widely used by parents, professionals, and courts. The materials help families — especially those without lawyers — create clear, developmentally appropriate parenting arrangements and have been cited in more than 60 Ontario decisions. To explain the Guide’s development and use, Bala co-authored, with Ontario Supreme Court Justice Andrea Himel, The AFCC-Ontario Parenting Plan Guide and Template: Jurisdictionally-Specific Resources For Family Justice Professionals And Parents. Since 2023, he has collaborated with partners in Alberta and British Columbia to adapt these tools in those provinces. Ongoing research is evaluating their effectiveness in reducing conflict and improving co parenting relationships, and he is currently leading a task force to revise the Guide.
Advancing knowledge on high conflict parenting and family violence
Bala has also contributed significantly to understanding parental alienation, high conflict family disputes, and cases involving intimate partner violence. His interdisciplinary collaborations with Dr. Rachel Birnbaum, Dr. Peter Jaffe, and others, funded by SSHRC, Justice Canada, and Health Canada, have informed both policy and practice, including evaluations of Toronto’s pilot Integrated Domestic Violence Court. The SCC cited his writing in this area in its 2022 Barendregt v. Grebliunas decision, a leading case on the impact of family violence in parenting disputes. Bala was also the lead editor and a substantial contributor to “Understanding Family Violence in Family Court Proceedings,” (University of Toronto Press, 2025), a volume of papers dealing with family violence cases in the family courts.
Shaping youth justice in Canada
Since authoring the first edition of Youth Criminal Justice Law in 1997 (new edition with Queen’s Law’s Professor Lisa Kelly expected in late 2026), Bala has been a central voice in youth justice reform. His scholarship emphasizes adolescents’ greater rehabilitative potential, diminished maturity, and need for legal responses tailored to their developmental realities.
His work has been instrumental in shaping court decisions and policy, helping contribute to a long term decline in youth custody rates. The Supreme Court has cited his writing in dozens of major youth justice cases, including R. v. B. (1993), arguably the most significant youth justice case in Canadian legal history, which cites five publications Bala authored or co-authored, relying on his explanations of the then-current state of the law and adopting several of his recommendations about how the law should change to be more responsive to the reality of adolescent responsibility and potential for rehabilitation. His work on youth justice was again cited by a majority of the Supreme Court in its 2025 youth justice decisions in R. v. I.M. and R. v. S.B., and its 2026 decision in R. v. Hussein.
A scholar widely cited at home and abroad
Bala’s influence is clearly felt across legal academia and practice. By late 2025, his scholarship had been cited nearly 7,000 times (Google Scholar) and referenced in 42 SCC cases, as well as in courts across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Singapore. His writing also appears in key national resources such as the National Judicial Institute Bench Books and leading legal treatises in family, youth, and contract law.
Dean Colleen M. Flood praises Bala’s impact over his career.
“Nicholas Bala brings legendary energy to his research, focusing on issues that matter for children and families’ experience of the justice system and working to translate research insight into legal change,” she says. “We are delighted to see him honoured as this year’s Mundell Medal winner.”
Beyond his research, Bala has also been a highly regarded teacher. He has collaborated with Queen’s Law Professor Mary-Jo Maur and other colleagues on several editions of a case book used at several law schools and has won the Queen’s Law Students’ Society Teaching Excellence Award three times.
“I have always enjoyed my research and writing, but teaching has been my passion, and it has also been a very important but subtle way of influencing the development of family law.”
Among his many accolades, Bala was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013 and was named a William R. Lederman Distinguished University Professor in 2019. He received both a Law Society of Ontario Medal and an Ontario Bar Association Award for Excellence in Family Law in 2009, and an Association of Family and Conciliation Courts President’s Award in 2020.
By Tracy Weaver