International Symposium Series: Reflective Practice for Legal Professionals
Welcome to the website created for the first International Symposium Series: Reflective Practice for Legal Professionals hosted by Queen’s University Faculty of Law, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Meet the Organizers
Queen’s Law Professor Sharry Aiken and Visiting Scholar Dr. Michele Leering have collaborated with sponsors and supporters to organize the Symposium Series. This Series is being hosted by Queen’s Law. We are grateful to work, play, and live on the traditional territories of Indigenous Peoples.
Land Acknowledgement*
Queen’s University is situated on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. The Indigenous Community of Katarokwi/Kingston continues to reflect the area’s Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee roots. Métis and First Peoples from other Nations including the Huron-Wendat, and Inuit from across Turtle Island are also present on these lands today.
This territory is included in the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Confederacy of the Ojibwe and Allied Nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.
As settlers, newcomers and Indigenous Peoples, we have all been invited into this Treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect. We are endeavouring to ensure that the spirit of reconciliation is honoured and respected through our work. We are also mindful of broken treaties, as well as the global structures and systems that have continued to oppress, dispossess and displace peoples across Turtle Island today.
We are grateful for being able to organize this Symposium Series from this Territory. Through our work on this initiative, we hope to contribute meaningfully towards truth, reconciliation, and reparation with Indigenous Peoples on these lands. We aim to do so by building the capacity of legal professionals to reflect effectively, deeply and critically and to take authentic, meaningful, and constructive action on historic and continuing injustice.
We recognize our responsibilities as Treaty people to speak the truth, search for peace and demand justice; and engage in a meaningful, continuous process of truth and reconciliation with all our relations.
*Portions of this text are adapted, with gratitude, from land acknowledgements produced by Queen's University, the City of Kingston, and The 519.
Why we developed this Symposium Series
The Series brings together scholars, educators, and practitioners to explore how disciplined reflection can strengthen the legal profession's response to contemporary challenges and advance reflective practice across the legal educational spectrum and beyond. Virtual panels over three days 22 - 24 June 2026 hosted by Queen’s will cross-pollinate ideas, insights, and pedagogy across jurisdictions, strengthening our collective working relationships and deepening our understanding of effective reflective practice. The Series also includes in-person events at other conferences between 16 April and 03 July 2026 organized by collaborating law teacher associations in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Our presenters' details are listed under the "Abstracts" tab and under the "Programs" tab you will find more information about events in the Series.
The Series is intended to:
- Respond to systemic challenges: Strengthen the capacity of legal professionals and the profession to respond to historic, current, and evolving disorienting and disruptive challenges facing democratic societies and the legal profession—captured by the term “polycrisis” and the United Nations 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.3 on equal access to justice and the rule of law. Reflective inquiry and practice can deepen understanding of these systemic challenges and enhance the ability to respond authentically and effectively.
- Develop critically reflective praxis: Strengthen the capacity of emerging legal professionals to engage in disciplined and systematic reflection that produces critically reflective praxis—enabling them to examine how legal and societal institutions function, how law is experienced by those subject to it, and how their own practice influences justice outcomes. This dimension of reflection is essential to professional identity formation and ethical decision-making.
- Learn across disciplines and cultures: Recognize that the legal profession has much to learn from other professional disciplines—particularly healthcare and other fields with established reflective traditions—and from diverse cultural approaches, especially Indigenous epistemologies and practices of reflection. Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural learning enriches understanding of how to foster reflective competencies.
- Advance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): Advance SoTL in law by examining how the reflective practice of legal educators contributes to innovation in legal pedagogy and supports institutional goals of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
About this Website
This website is designed to capture the content, energy and enthusiasm of our presenters so that it can be shared beyond the Series events. It is intended as a legacy site to mobilize and disseminate knowledge about how to understand and encourage reflective practice as a core professional competency for legal professionals. It will continue to evolve to provide resources and inspiration for encouraging reflective practice in law. The "Abstracts" tab lists the many speakers who are enlightening and motivating us by sharing their knowledge at one of the many Series events between April and July 2026.
Meet the Symposium Series' Advisory Committee
We are grateful for the sage counsel of our colleagues consulted throughout this initiative:
- Prof. Lisa Radtke Bliss, Georgia State College of Law, Atlanta, USA
- Prof. Christa Bracci, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
- Prof. Lindsay Borrows, Queen’s Law Professor in Indigenous Law and Governance, Queen’s University
- Prof. Jane Ching, Professor of Professional Legal Education, & Director of NLS Centre for Legal Education, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham, UK
- Prof. Jeff Giddings, Associate Dean (Experiential Education), Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
- Audrey Fried, Director, Faculty & Curriculum Development, Osgoode Professional Development Institute, Toronto, Canada
- Odi Lagi, Co-President, Global Alliance for Justice Education, & Executive Director, Network of University Legal Aid Institutions (NULAI), Abuja, Nigeria
- Prof. Annie Rochette, Faculty of Law, Civil Law Section, University of Ottawa, Canada
- Prof. Gemma Smyth, Faculty of Law, University of Windsor, Canada
Meet our Supporters
We are delighted that the following organizations have provided in-kind support to enable this Series to happen including the Association of Canadian Clinical Legal Educators (ACCLE), Association of Law Teachers (ALT - UK), Canadian Association of Law Teachers (CALT), Canadian Law & Society Association (CLSA), Australian Legal Education Associate Deans Network (LEAD), and Nottingham Trent Centre for Legal Education. We appreciate the generosity of the conference organizers who are hosting speakers, panels and roundtables that form part of this series between April and July 2026 including ALT, CALT, the Australasian Law Academics Association (ALAA) and the Nottingham Trent Centre for Legal Education. More information about these conferences can be found under the "Programs" tab.
Meet our Sponsors
We deeply appreciate the financial and in-kind support from the organizations who are sponsors of this Series.
