When Natasha Mukhtar submitted a paper to Professor Beverley Baines this past school year, she had an understandable amount of pride in it. As a project supervised by Professor Baines, it represented months of work on a case comment regarding equality rights.

What she didn’t expect was it to be accepted for publication in the Canadian Journal of Family Law – and to win their Allan Falconer Memorial Student Essay Competition. “It was a paper I was really excited to write,” she says, “but I was initially really worried about whether it was any good! It was about a complicated case, where the judgement itself is around 500 paragraphs, there are three different lines of dissent and it’s difficult to decipher what the outcome of the case even is since the court was so divided. I’m grateful that the editors of theCanadian Journal of Family Law thought my paper was able to make sense of and contribute something based on such a controversial and complicated case.”

The paper, a case comment on Eric v. Lola, combines the context of family law in Quebec and the constitutional law element of a Charter challenge. “The facts of the case are fascinating: it was a dispute between the owner of Cirque du Soleil and his common law partner who was a Brazilian model who he began a relationship with when she was just 17 and he was 32,” Mukhtar explains. “It’s one of those cases that just gets more and more interesting the more you find out about it. I wrote a feminist critique of the case and analyzed the court’s reasoning and its decision to exclude common law couples in Quebec from spousal support and a division of property upon separation. I commented on how that can have a negative impact on women in common law relationships.”

As well as the guidance of Professor Baines, Mukhtar credits her experiences in courses at Queen’s Law, which opened her eyes to these issues. “I took Family Law with Professor Bala and I enjoyed the course,” she says. “I saw that there are issues in family law that are interesting to examine from a feminist perspective to see how they might impact women differently than men. That sort of added to what I had first learned about Eric v. Lola in Constitutional Law in first year.”

Her paper will be published in the spring issue of the Canadian Journal of Family Law.