Ryerson University's Inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Law is Glad to be Back Home

By Neil Armstrong

Photo credit: Mitch Wojnarowicz      Donna E. Young, Dean of the Faculty of Law, Ryerson University in Toronto

Donna E. Young, the founding dean of Ryerson University’s new Faculty of Law, started her tenure on the first day of 2020.

Before taking up this appointment she was the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at the Albany Law School, the oldest independent law school in the United States. Young also held a joint appointment at the University at Albany’s Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

“It means everything to me. I’ve loved my job at Albany Law, I’m just in the middle of sending a message to my students thanking them but Toronto really is home and I cannot be happier,” says Young, who has more than 26 years in the legal academy, in an interview with the Gleaner one week before Christmas.

Ryerson’s Faculty of Law reimagines legal education to create a new kind of lawyer, driven by a curriculum designed to increase the career readiness of graduates, to enhance diversity in the legal profession, and to improve access to justice. 

Young says one of the reasons she was attracted to applying for the deanship was because she was impressed with what the university’s team had already worked on and the strategic plan and mission that they had put together.

“I was particularly impressed with their commitment to diversity and inclusion and diversifying the legal profession and providing better access to educational opportunities.”

Young spent her entire career working on understanding anti-discrimination laws and understanding the ways in which the law reflects stereotypes based on many things and how historically it has been a tool against social justice.

She said the law has also been a tool for social justice so it is a “double-edged thing.”
“Ryerson’s new law school seems to want to go in that direction, the same direction that I would like to go in and I’m absolutely thrilled that I can be part of that.” 

At Albany Law School, Young’s teaching focused on criminal law, employment regulation, federal civil procedure, and gender and race discrimination.

She wasn’t a lawyer for very long as she was admitted to the New York State Bar and immediately became a law professor. 

In law school, she was interested in the doctrinal problems that were reflected in the legal system and as someone whose father was a high school teacher she saw herself as following in that path.

“It’s a kind of a combination of the law being a tool of social justice but also my interest in being a teacher that combined to kind of encourage that path.”

Her move to New York in 1992 was supposed to be temporary when she accompanied her boyfriend, Peter Halewood -- now her husband – who was doing his LL.M. at Columbia Law School. She had just graduated and articled in Toronto.

While in New York, Young studied for the Bar, took the Bar, worked, and at the same time simultaneously applied for positions at American law schools.

Albany was the first interview she had and it went really well, said Young, so she started at Albany Law as a visiting professor. She took two years to go back to Columbia to do her LL.M. and returned to Albany, which gave her an incredible opportunity to grow. Halewood is also a professor at the law school.

“I never thought I would spend most of my adult years in the States but that’s what happened and I’ve been very happy here, but it’s time to come home, it’s time to come home,” she says.

 A trailblazing educator and respected scholar, she held leadership positions on core faculty committees at Albany Law and was a member of the board of directors of nonprofit organizations dedicated to women’s health and to civil rights and civil liberties.

Young is a first-generation Canadian raised in North York, the daughter of parents from Jamaica and Belize. 

Her mother, Lilethe Young, came to Canada from Jamaica in the late 1950s as a nurse and worked in various hospitals and institutions for her entire career.

“She and her family had an enormous influence over my identity. She is a strong woman and anyone who meets her is immediately attracted to her; she’s fabulous.”

Robert William Young, her father, is from Belize and taught at Leaside High School from the late 1950s until he retired in the early 1990s.

“He was responsible for encouraging the education of his children and showing us the importance of it. He’s a gentle and kind and brilliant and funny man and coming home to them is just a dream come true.”

Her husband’s family lives in Cobourg, Ontario and their youngest son, Lucas Young, 18, lives in North York with her parents and will start his postsecondary studies at the University of Toronto.

Their older son, Isaac Young, 22, is in his last year at Yale University where he is an East Asian Studies major specializing in Chinese and speaks Mandarin.

“Being from a West Indian background has really taught me the hard work that immigrants contribute to making their lives and their family’s life enriching but also they’re incredible to Canada. They contribute so much, they contribute so much of their hard work.”

When she moved to the United States she was very aware that she was from an immigrant background but she was also an immigrant migrating to the US so that has been central to her identity. 

She hopes that as a new dean she can encourage students who are like her and those who are not to consider law as a possibility.

She goes to Jamaica regularly and has family in Kingston, St. Andrew, and St. Ann.

Before entering the academy, she worked in litigation at Toronto’s Cornish Roland Barristers & Solicitors, at the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and at the City of New York Mayor's Office of Labor Relations, Legal Department.

In Rome, Italy, she was a consultant at the International Development Law Organization and a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Law at the University Roma Tre. Young has worked on development projects in Sri Lanka, Uganda and Mexico. She holds a bachelor of science (honours) in psychology from the University of Toronto, an LL.B. from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, and an LL.M. from Columbia University School of Law, where she was also an Associate in Law.

Young is the third of four children with an older sister, who is a speech pathologist; an older brother is a dentist; and her younger brother is the principal of an elementary school.

She says law schools in Canada are world class and she would like to integrate Ryerson into that academy of excellence.

“Canadian law schools really have established themselves and given Canada a good reputation for legal scholarship and for legal practice around the world so I want Ryerson to be part of that and to contribute to that.”

She said because Ryerson is a new law school it has been able to, from its inception, articulate a vision of social justice and inclusion.

Other law schools are doing that too but Ryerson’s founding documents require that – “that was the promise that Ryerson has given to the Ontario Bar and other accrediting agencies and while doing that they’ve also made a promise to provide training in new technologies for its students so that the students can graduate and use those skills either in the practice of law or in any other area that they choose.”

The purpose of this is to provide access to those who have traditionally been struggling to have access to the legal system, either in terms of cost or location, or in cultural competency or in something else.

Ryerson promises from the beginning to try to meet the needs of those groups who have had traditionally had difficulties accessing the legal system.

She said other law schools in Canada are doing similar work but what distinguishes Ryerson “is that the curriculum will be quite a bit different, it’s going to be a structured curriculum which will allow its graduates to take the bar exam and enter the bar after three years without having to article for one more year after graduating.

The curriculum is tightly designed to provide the kinds of experiences and education that the students need to be able to graduate and practice right away.

“The choices are already fantastic, it’s just a different choice.”

[An edited version of this story has been published in the North American Weekly Gleaner, January 2-8, 2020.]