Professors Samuel Dahan and Lisa Kerr have been named the inaugural scholars of the Queen’s Law Research Excellence Scholars (RES) program, created to provide time and resources to enhance the research trajectory of Queen’s Law full-time faculty.
The annual program invites faculty members to submit proposed research projects that have the potential to advance research excellence and have national and international impacts. Up to two faculty members may be recognized as RES program scholars each year. Offering one- or two-year appointments, the program provides each scholar teaching relief of one to two courses per year to support their proposed research project. It also entitles each scholar to access up to $10,000 in internal research funding during their term as RES program scholars.
“The RES program empowers our faculty to pursue bold, high-impact research that addresses pressing societal challenges,” says Dean Colleen M. Flood. “By supporting exceptional scholars like Professors Dahan and Kerr, we aim to elevate Queen’s Law as a leader in innovative legal research, both nationally and globally.”
As an RES program scholar, Professor Dahan, Director, Queen’s Conflict Analytics Lab (CAL), will advance his ongoing research in legal AI, which focuses on developing and evaluating open-source solutions to address Canada’s access-to-justice crisis and builds on a robust foundation of innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration.
At the core of this research is OpenJustice, the first open-source platform designed to instill legal knowledge and reasoning into language models. Launched in 2021 in partnership with Smith Engineering, OpenJustice serves as a fine-tuning and programming environment for legal professionals working in plain English. It provides a “programming guide for lawyers,” enabling practitioners to supervise AI models for nuanced legal reasoning tasks. By integrating dialogue flows that break down complex legal issues into manageable decision points, OpenJustice transforms generic AI responses into context-specific legal insights. This approach is anticipated to enhance the accuracy and reliability of legal AI while potentially offering legal aid providers a practical, adaptable tool.
“Canada is facing a profound access-to-justice crisis,” Dahan says. “Nearly six million Canadians with legal issues are unable to afford counsel, and legal aid organizations routinely turn away about half of the individuals in need. Although emerging technologies … offer promise in reducing these barriers, they come with significant limitations. Most existing AI tools are proprietary and designed for monetizable applications, which leaves legal professionals, particularly legal aid providers, with generic, low-quality, and potentially unsafe solutions.”
Dahan points out that both generic AI tools and those designed for legal tasks can exhibit error rates as high as 88 per cent, and without established best practices, their reliable use in legal aid settings remains elusive.
“This RES appointment will enable me to devote time to managing and co-ordinating large-scale funding and international collaborations that are vital for advancing the OpenJustice project,” he says. “The teaching relief will free up essential time to handle these time-consuming tasks, such as grant management and travel for partnership development. This additional capacity will also allow me to work closely with partner organizations — academia and industry — to expand OpenJustice into other jurisdictions, thereby strengthening our collaborative network and enhancing the project’s overall impact.”
Professor Kerr’s RES program plan is to develop new research on the treatment of substance use disorder in sentencing decisions, and its wider connections to drug policy experimentation and the receptivity of criminal law to shifts in scientific knowledge.
Having a longstanding interest in the biology and psychology of addiction, Kerr’s current research is a natural extension of her sentencing scholarship to date, which has focused on social context evidence at sentencing, judicial discretion and mandatory sentencing, the penalty of life without the possibility of parole, and the relationship between sentencing principles and prison conditions. She is looking at how judges across Canada are attuned to the ways in which both substance and behavioural addictions can impact the question of individual responsibility for criminal conduct, and how courts are increasingly tasked with responding to complex scenarios of serious overlapping mental illness and addiction.
“Judges are clearly aware of the ways in which the medical, social, and psychological circumstances of offenders can complicate the concern with moral blameworthiness that is central to Canadian sentencing law, though their hands are often tied by concerns with rehabilitative prospects and public safety,” Kerr says.
Other dimensions of her research will focus on how criminal law policy has responded to the evolution of the opioid epidemic, “both in terms of greater severity in sentencing ranges but also in terms of significant policy experimentation in the direction of diversion and decriminalization.”
Several years into the opioid crisis and with waves of toxic drug supply continuing to devastate communities, Kerr explains that this is a time of diverse state responses to the problem of substance use disorders. For example, with an upcoming federal election, PC leader Pierre Poilievre turned his attention to sentencing law and promising a mandatory life sentence for fentanyl trafficking in excess of 40 mg. At the same time, Problem Solving Courts across Canada are engaging in restorative justice for low-level offenders, and 2022 drug law amendments recognize that problematic substance use should be addressed primarily as a health and social issue. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down mandatory minimums for drug trafficking in 2016, while also making clear in 2021 that substantial penitentiary terms including up to life imprisonment should be imposed on the directing minds of large-scale fentanyl trafficking.
A final topic Kerr wishes to explore is how “the neuroscientific understanding of addiction has continued to evolve.” We know more than ever about the neuro-biological dimension of addiction, Kerr explains, and the ways in which addiction is not a matter of moral deficit or personal choice. The question is how “legal doctrines can receive and respond to this evolution in expert knowledge.”
“My plan is to push my research in the direction of responding to this period of policy experimentation and to engage in media, scholarly, and judicial forums on these topics.”
Kerr will apply for a new SSHRC grant to support her work in these areas and to develop training and research opportunities for Queen’s Law students. She received a SSHRC Insight Development Gran ($45,553) in 2019 for her project “Sentencing Racialized Defendants: Collective Experience and the Promise of a Fit Sanction.”
The Queen’s Law Research Excellence Scholars program requires that, while actively pursuing their identified research projects, program scholars must demonstrate research excellence through a variety of activities, including regularly presenting and publishing their research in highly regarded journals or via other means, applying for/holding external grants to support their research, attracting and supporting graduate research trainees, and providing research opportunities for undergrad students.
By Tracy Weaver