Biography
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Janine Benedet graduated with her LLB (Bachelor of Laws) degree from the University of British Columbia in 1993. She completed a judicial clerkship with the Hon. Frank Iacobucci at the Supreme Court of Canada, and completed the requirements to be called to the bars of Ontario (1996) and British Columbia (1999). She practiced labour and employment law in Toronto from 1996-1999. She attended the University of Michigan law school for her graduate work, completing an LLM in
1995 and an SJD in 2003. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by leading feminist legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon, considered the application of constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression to law prohibiting sexual harassment in employment and education.
Janine Benedet began her academic career when she was appointed to the position of Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in 1999. While at Osgoode, her scholarship focused on sex equality under law, including same-sex sexual harassment in employment, child pornography and sexual assault. She was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2004. Professor Benedet then joined the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia as an Associate Professor in 2005.
Professor Benedet's scholarly focus has continued to focus on legal responses to sex inequality, and in particular the criminal law's treatment of sexual violence against women. With Professor Isabel Grant, she has published a significant body of scholarship on the sexual assault of women with mental disabilities, bringing to bear an intersecting critical disability and feminist lens. She has also published work on the sex offender registry and Canada's prostitution laws. Professor Benedet has been invited to present her scholarly work at numerous academic conferences both in Canada and internationally. Professor Benedet is an Associate Editor of the Criminal Reports and part of the team of authors who write the Criminal Law Essentials e-letter for Canadian Judges. She is frequently invited to plan and present at judicial education programs.
Professor Benedet combines her academic work with an ongoing engagement with the front-line women's anti-violence movement. She has engaged in ongoing public education about the laws regarding sexual assault, prostitution and pornography in public forums across Canada. She has also acted as legal counsel pro bono in two significant constitutional cases involving questions of sex equality and violence: Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium v. Canada (Customs seizures of same-sex pornographic materials) and Bedford v.
Canada (Criminal prostitution and pimping laws). In Bedford, she appeared before the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2011 and the Supreme Court of Canada in 2013, representing a coalition of seven Aboriginal, anglophone and francophone women's groups.
