Wednesday, May 7, 2025, from 7 to 9 pm at Memorial University Bruneau (formerly Inco) Innovation Centre, Lecture Theatre Room 2001. Parking is free in adjacent Lot 17.  The Centre is located on the University campus, south of Prince Philip Drive, on Irwin’s Road just east of Queen Elizabeth II Library.  View the event poster here.

Dr. Bernadette McSherry, Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, a Commissioner on the Victorian Law Reform Commission, and the author of Managing Fear: The Law and Ethics of Preventive Detention and Risk Assessment, will deliver the 2025 Chief Justice Sir Francis Forbes Annual Law Lecture.

All lawyers, judges, academics, physicians, therapists, social workers, nurses, correctional officers, and other members of the public with an interest in criminal or mental health law will want to experience Dr. McSherry’s lecture. She brings to the Lecture unique articulation skills, likely to engage and inform an audience. She combines her subject’s case study narratives with analysis, and with selective references to comparable circumstances in Australia, Canada, other nations, the European Union, and the United Nations. Her breadth of expertise embraces law, ethics, psychology, and political science.

The Lecture’s namesake Sir Francis Forbes, seventh Chief Justice of Newfoundland from 1816 to 1822, also served as Chief Justice of New South Wales from 1822 to 1837. Like Chief Justice Forbes, Dr. McSherry has positively influenced both Australian and Newfoundland and Labrador law and ethics. Innovative Provincial Court Judge John L. Joy, for example, has judicially noted her work in his Labrador decisions on the unlawful restraint of prisoners in court, especially women (Kalleo, 2016 CanLII 7716) and youth (M.O., 2020 CanLII 23942), and in his broad-ranging bail judgment (Ashini, 2015 CanLII 3045).

Dr. McSherry is a frontstall choice as a speaker for the Forbes Lecture Series. She will follow in the enviable tradition of august previous speakers. They include the 25^th Chief Justice of Newfoundland and Labrador J. Derek Green who rendered the inaugural lecture in January 2016, and include Beverley McLachlin while Chief Justice, and sitting Justice Malcolm Rowe, of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Law Society, Law Foundation, and Memorial University jointly support this lecture series.

David C. Day, K.C.,
NL Bar, 1968

For more information, or to add this event to your calendar, please click here.

Posted: April 24, 2025