Dr. Deanne Sowter

Biography

Deanne Sowter is an Adjunct Lecturer and doctoral candidate at Queen's University, where she holds the prestigious Vanier Scholarship and McCarthy Tetrault Fellowship. Her research primarily focuses on legal ethics, family law, gender-based violence, feminist legal theory, tort law, and evidence law. Recently, she has been studying the ethics myths and stereotypes surrounding lawyers in family violence cases, contributing significantly to academic discourse by publishing in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice and the Dalhousie Law Journal. Her work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, and she has been awarded various fellowships for her contributions to teaching and legal ethics. Deanne has presented her work at significant platforms, including the Queen's Law Visiting Speaker Series and the Tort Law & Social Equality Project at the University of Toronto. With a JD from Osgoode Hall Law School and an LLM from the University of Toronto, she is a trained family lawyer committed to addressing issues such as intimate partner violence in legal practice. Deanne's doctoral dissertation addresses the inadequacies in current family law practices and seeks to recenter the role of lawyers in a manner that supports survivors and challenges the status quo.

Research Interests

Experience