Ottawa, June 5, 2023 - The Canadian Bar Association’s Fellowship Committee has selected Amitpal C. Singh to receive the 2023-2024 Viscount Bennett Fellowship for his graduate legal studies.
Mr. Singh is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and is currently an associate attorney with Holwell, Shuster & Goldberg LLP in New York City. The Fellowship will help support his graduate studies at Yale Law School, where his work will focus on pressing issues at the intersection of private law theory and Aboriginal law.
The Viscount Bennett Fellowship is awarded annually to a Canadian law student to encourage high standards of legal education, training and ethics. The Fellowship was established under the terms of a trust created by former Prime Minister and CBA President Viscount Richard Bedford Bennett. The first Fellowship was awarded in 1946.
Quotes
“Amitpal Singh has a demonstrated history of academic excellence combined with a deep personal commitment to community. Amitpal’s engagement with community services through pro bono and other work in the social justice arena is representative of the impactful nature of the contributions of CBA members. His extracurricular and legal activities reflect his goal of becoming a legal academic.”
- CBA Viscount Bennett Fellowship Selection Committee
“I am honoured and humbled to carry the torch of the Viscount Bennett Fellowship to Yale Law School. I believe that careful theoretical reflection, properly anchored in legal doctrine and practice, can be a force for positive, real world change. The Fellowship will allow me to reaffirm my commitment to that project, with a particular focus on the land rights of Canada’s Indigenous peoples and the complex issues of property law, constitutional law, and legal philosophy that those rights raise.”
Quick facts
- Amitpal Singh earned his J.D. at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where he received numerous awards for high standing in his studies, for his leadership, and for excellence in extracurricular activities, including the Dean’s Cecil A. Wright Key, Justice Michael J. Moldaver Prize, Dean’s Leadership Award, and Private Law Writing Prize.
- He served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of both the Journal of Law & Equality and Indigenous Law Journal during law school.
- Before entering legal studies, he earned a B.A (Hons.) and a M.A in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
- The fall after he graduated law school, he served as an adjunct professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto as well as the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at the Toronto Metropolitan University, where he taught in the 1L curriculum.
- He practices law with commercial litigation boutique Holwell, Shuster & Goldberg LLP in New York City.
- His peer-reviewed articles on Aboriginal and Indigenous law, property law, law and revolution, stare decisis and other topics appear in the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, McGill Law Journal, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, and the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal.
- He has presented his research at law schools in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, the U.S., and U.K., including the Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group, the David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and the Tel Aviv University Workshop for Junior Scholars in Law.
- He has been selected to clerk at the British Columbia Court of Appeal.
- The Viscount Bennett Fellowship carries a value of $25,000.
Related links
Viscount Bennett Fellowship
Canadian Bar Association
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