Professor Jacob Weinrib is the recipient of the 2025 Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT) Academic Excellence Award, bestowed annually to honour exceptional contribution to research and law teaching by a Canadian law teacher in mid-career.  

“Jacob’s extraordinary innovation in scholarship and teaching make him exceptionally deserving of this award,” says Dean Colleen M. Flood. “I am thrilled that he is receiving this recognition for his achievements as a legal scholar and educator.”

Weinrib, who joined the Faculty in 2015, describes Queen’s Law as “a wonderfully stimulating place to research and teach.”

“I am incredibly grateful to my colleagues for their willingness to explore ideas and arguments, to our staff for their endless innovation and support, and to our wonderful students, whose curiosity and thoughtfulness constantly push me to become a better teacher,” he says.

“Finally, I am grateful to Dean Flood and Associate Dean Cherie Metcalf for nominating me for this award, and for making the dissemination of legal research an institutional priority. It is exciting to join prior recipients of this award from Queen’s Law, including public law all-stars like Professors Mark Walters, Don Stuart, and David Mullan.”

The quality of Weinrib’s scholarship is exceptional. In 2025, he won Queen’s Law’s Professor Les Green Award for Research Excellence. He is the author of two monographs published by Cambridge University Press, Dimensions of Dignity: The Theory and Practice of Modern Constitutional Law (2016) and The Impasse of Constitutional Rights (2025). In 2020, the journal Jurisprudence devoted a symposium to Dimensions of Dignity, with a reviewer describing the book as the “most important theoretical account of modern constitutional law that presently exists.” Weinrib’s articles have appeared in leading international journals including Modern Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, University of Toronto Law Journal, Supreme Court Law Review, and Law and Philosophy. His scholarship has global reach, with articles translated into Spanish and Russian, and citations by the Supreme Court of Canada.  

Colleague letters supporting Weinrib’s nomination for this award attest to the excellence of his scholarship.  

“I can say without any reservation that Professor Weinrib’s work is brilliant, deep, and innovative, and it is already having — and will only continue to have for many years in the future — an important impact not only on Canadian law and institutions, but on law and institutions in many other jurisdictions around the world, as well,” wrote Professor Malcolm Thorburn, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Chair of Law and Innovation. “Professor Weinrib has a record that is simply staggering in its accomplishment in such a short time…” His work sets out the “foundations for a systematic working-through of public law: in comparative law, in Canadian constitutional law, and in legal philosophy.”  

Professor TRS Allan, University of Cambridge Faculty of Law and one of the world’s leading public law scholars, described Weinrib as a “…quite outstanding scholar, who is making a distinctive and important contribution to public law thought.” He wrote that ”…Professor Weinrib is adding a powerful new strand of thought to a richly debated and quite sophisticated body of academic theorising about public law in liberal democracies” and described The Impasse of Constitutional Rights as “an original and incisive intervention in the academic debate over rights, offering the prospect of real intellectual advance.”  

Professor Alon Harel, the Mizock Chair in Administrative Law and Criminal Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, characterized Weinrib as “among the very best theoreticians combining sophisticated knowledge of philosophy, political theory, legal theory and constitutional and administrative law.”  Harel observes that Weinrib “has developed a coherent comprehensive framework addressing the most fundamental questions of public law. His erudition, his rigor and his broad and creative thinking are a great asset to the community of public law scholars.”

Students describe Weinrib’s approach to teaching as captivating, creative, conceptually clear, funny, and memorable. He received the Queen’s Law Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching in both 2019 and 2023.  

Employing a narrative approach to teaching, Weinrib begins each class by telling a story that captures the structure of some legal phenomenon. The stories emerge from paintings, literature, history, current events, jokes, and his own personal anecdotes. Weinrib then connects the structure of these stories to structure found within constitutional and administrative law. Over the course of the semester, he connects and diagrams these structures, weaving an overarching framework that illuminates an area of law.  

“My aim as a teacher is not to transfer bits and pieces of information about a legal subject to students,” Weinrib explains. “Anyone who is smart enough to get into law school can access the bits and pieces without my help. Rather, my aim as a teacher is to build a structure in the minds of students in which all the bits and pieces fit together. When students understand this structure, they can make sense of the law for themselves.”  

While Weinrib is loved by his students, Thorburn emphasizes that “he is loved for the right reasons. Despite his well-known love of jokes, Weinrib can only take the law and legal ideas extremely seriously. Students love him because he makes them love the law and makes them love thinking hard about the law — and that is the essence of a superb teacher. That is also what will leave the greatest legacy of all on the legal landscape: Professor Weinrib’s engaged students who have come to love the law and to take it seriously through his example.”

By Tracy Weaver