Tenille E. Brown
LLB (Scots, Honours), LLM, Phd Candidate (University of Ottawa), Barrister and Solicitor at the Bar of Ontario.
Professor Brown holds an LL.M. from the University of Ottawa in the field of Aboriginal law and the then-draft International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and an LL.B. (Scots law) (Honours) from the University of Dundee, Scotland, where she graduated high school before immigrating to Canada.
Prior to joining Bora Laskin Faculty of Law, Professor Brown was an adjunct professor in the Common Law and Civil Law Sections of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, where she taught Property Law in the first year JD programme. She also created and taught two courses, Legal Theory and Social Sciences taught in the Civil law section as part of the undergraduate certificate in law offered by the Civil law section, and Law and Geography an elective offering in the JD programme Common law section. This was the first legal geography course in a law school in Canada.
Professor Brown is a member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre housed at the University of Ottawa. Professor Brown holds professional membership at the Bar of Ontario. She was a Student at Law at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic, Canada’s leading public interest technology law clinic, where she contributed to interventions at the Supreme Court of Canada in the area of privacy law. She has practised in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, administrative and employment law. Before moving into academia, Professor Brown worked in the Kingdom of Eswatini (at that time known as the Kingdom of Swaziland), Southern Africa, as a legal officer in a feminist organization.
Professor Brown’s doctorate research is in the area of legal geography examining the intersection between property, geography and the creation of place in Canada. Her PhD thesis is titled “The Geographies of Property Law: An Engagement with Place and Space.”
While completing her doctorate at the University of Ottawa, Professor Brown contributed to research projects on topics including: access to land and Indigenous peoples, mapping and digital technologies, data governance and on the regulation of emerging technologies. She was a student member on the Social Science and Humanities Research Council funded project titled “Geothink: Canadian Geospatial and Open Data Research Partnership,” where she contributed to research on liability in data use, open data and data propertization. As well she researched on the intersection between mapping, evidence and Constitutional s.35 Indigenous land rights for the mapping database “dreamcatcher” created by Co-Map, the Centre for Community Mapping, Waterloo, in partnership with the Mississauga’s of New Credit First Nation.