An award-winning teacher and scholar, Eric M Adams, BA (McGill), LLB (Dalhousie), SJD (Toronto), is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law, where he teaches constitutional law, employment law, and advanced problems in constitutional law. Prior to obtaining his doctorate, he practiced at a Toronto law firm in the areas of civil litigation, employment, labour, administrative, and constitutional law.
Professor Adams has published widely in the fields of constitutional law, legal history, employment law, and legal education. His work has also been cited by both the Supreme Court of Canada and the House of Commons. He provides frequent media commentary, especially on constitutional matters, and his editorials have appeared in newspapers across the country, including The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, and Edmonton Journal.
He is the lead legal historian on the SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant, Landscapes of Injustice, investigating the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. He is also currently working on a book on the history of Canadian constitutional law.
For 2016-2017, Adams was awarded the prestigious Killam Annual Professorship by the University of Alberta. This professorship is awarded to academics who have demonstrated a record of outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service to the community for three or more years.
The Centre will continue to post Professor Adams' research and publications on this page as it becomes available.
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Journal Articles
“Constitutional Stories: Japanese Canadians and the Constitution of Canada” (2018) Australasian Canadian Studies
“Judicial Agency and Anxiety: a Constitutional History of R v Drybones” (2018) National Journal of Constitutional Law
“The Law of Food Allergy and Accommodation in Canadian Schools” (2018) Asthma & Clinical Immunology (With B. Murdoch & T. Caulfield)
"Promises of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese Canadians” (2017) 54:3 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 687 (with Jordan Stanger-Ross)
“Judging the Limits of Cooperative Federalism” (2016) Supreme Court Law Review .
“Canadian Constitutional Identities” (2015) 38(2) Dalhousie Law Journal 311.
“Errors of Fact and Law: Race, Space, and Hockey in Christie v. York” (2012) 62 University of Toronto Law Journal 463.
“Constitutional Battles between Parliament and the Executive: the Canadian Prorogation Crisis” (2011) 43 Hosei Riron Journal of Law & Politics 144
“Building a Law of Human Rights: Roncarelli v. Duplessis in Canadian Constitutional Culture” (2010) 55 McGill Law Journal 437
“The Constitutionality of Prorogation” (2009) 18:1 Constitutional Forum constitutionnel 17
Book Chapters
“Canada’s Constitutional Coming of Age, 1900-1920” in Errol Mendes ed, Canada’s Constitutional Democracy: the 150th Anniversary Celebration (Toronto:
Lexis/Nexis, 2017) 65.
“Constitutional Nationalism: Law, Politics, and Culture on the Road to Patriation” in Steve Patten & Lois Harder eds., Patriation and its Consequences: Constitution Making in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015) 49
“Crossing Borders: American Influences on Canada’s Constitutional Rights Revolution” in Norman Domeier, et. al, eds., Inter-Trans-Supra? Legal Relations and Power Structures in History (Saarbrucken: AkademikerVerlag, 2011) 285
“Guardians of Liberty: R.M.W. Chitty and the Wartime Idea of Constitutional Rights” in Constance Backhouse and Wesley Pue eds., The Promise and Perils of Law: Lawyers in Canadian History (Toronto: Irwin law, 2009) 173
Review Essays
“Running from a Bear: Coordinate Constitutional Interpretation in Canada” (2012) 3(3) Journal of Transnational Law 324
Monograph: Canadian Constitutional Revolutions: Law, Politics, Culture
Article: “If at First You Don’t Succeed: Re-litigating Charter Rights”
Article: “‘Constitutional Questions of Gravity and Magnitude’: 100 years of Federalism at the Alberta Court of Appeal”
