2 September 2025
Written by Serikbolsyn Tastanbek
On an unusually snowy day for the UBC-Vancouver campus located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people—when all in‐person operations were cancelled—Dr. Mary Liston and I connected over Zoom in the warmth of our respective offices, and had an engaging conversation that illuminated the transformative power of public scholarship.
In the following interview, Dr. Liston, Associate Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at UBC, recounts her journey into academia—one marked by a commitment to challenge and decolonize conventional legal paradigms. Rather than viewing law as a static system of rules, she passionately advocates for understanding it as a dynamic “verb”: a way of creating relationships, fostering dialogue, and shaping society. This perspective has propelled her work in areas ranging from administrative law to the emerging field of Aboriginal administrative law, where she uses international comparative insights to reimagine legal accountability and justice in Canada.
Dr. Liston’s work in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations, whether through co-producing interactive educational tools or co-convening initiatives like the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities, offers a refreshing model for engaging diverse publics in meaningful dialogue about law and society.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Serikbolsyn Tastanbek: Can you please tell us about your background as a legal public scholar?
Mary Liston: I suppose one thing is thinking about one’s own positionality. I came back to school as a mature student. My first degree was in English language and literature at Western, which I loved. I thought about pursuing graduate work at the time in Old and Middle English. Those were my favourite subjects, but there were few jobs at that time. This was before Lord of the Rings became a movie, which may have produced more interest in that time period! I travelled in Europe and North Africa, worked overseas at Amnesty International, and when I came back to Canada I worked for a Public Commission in the Ontario government. These experiences influenced my decision to go back to school. I ended up doing a Master’s in Social and Political Thought at York University, which led me to think about law school. I was very much interested in multiculturalism and identity politics, and I thought law had a lot to do with shaping the Canadian identity. So, I went to law school at the University of Toronto and decided that I wanted to be an academic and not a lawyer, although I did work at a community legal clinic for a number of years. I pursued a combined degree in law and a doctorate in political science at the University of Toronto, where I focused on Canadian government and political thought in both law and political science—public law, basically. That trajectory has been important to me in my work.
ST: What is your definition of public scholarship? What do you value in public scholarship?
ML: Public scholarship produced at public universities in Canada entails a commitment to building a relationship with various publics. This democratic and epistemological commitment to knowledge generation and dissemination is hugely important and, as we know in these times, it’s vulnerable. So it’s really important to value, cherish and protect universities, and academic freedom from current economic and political pressures.
I think of public scholarship as very much connected with diverse publics. There’s not just one public; there’s a number of publics. I think about my students as a public, both graduate and JD students. I think about my own intellectual network as part of the public. I think about the various legal actors who comprise a specialized public. I hope my research has value for Indigenous communities in particular and of course for the general public. We all tend to do public outreach now as academics. We’re not just cloistered and in a silo. That’s important for me because law is outward-facing innately, unlike, perhaps, some other disciplines. For me, it’s really important to communicate a different understanding of law than a general public might have—that law is more than a system of rules. It’s a normative commitment to live by law, for better or for worse. It’s a way of being together and creating relationships. I say to my students: Law is not a noun. Law is better thought of as a verb, and we use law to create and structure relationships amongst ourselves as people, but also between the state and citizens or non-citizens. That’s a different way of thinking about law that I think really matters, and it’s also a way of creating meaning. Law creates meaning through, for example, rights claims on or demands to have obligations fulfilled from other. These claims that a person makes on other persons are about principles or disagreements about interpretations. Law, of course, involves rules, but it’s more than rules and it is very dynamic.
ST: The emphasis on public engagement, and positioning law as a verb, resonates with me as a language scholar, because to me, language is a verb and law is the same, right? It’s languaging, lawing, or something of that sort.
I wanted to dig a little deeper into the aspect of engaging with diverse and multicultural publics. How do you communicate your scholarship to them in a way that’s accessible?
ML: Law used to be very old school. There were Latin maxims, and there was legalese involving words like heretofore. Law used to be innately hard to understand. It was for insiders. Legal reform in the ’60s and ’70s changed the way in which laws was expressed in order for laws and legal actors to communicate better. Some legal academics think of the ‘style’ of expressing law as participating in a kind of modernist genre. It’s meant to be that kind of epitome of 20th-century writing, where you try to be as clear as possible; where it’s complicated, you try to be clear in how the law is complicated. I am thinking of Strunk and White here. That’s how we try to teach students about legal writing. It’s not about being legalistic; it’s about writing clearly and effectively.
Thinking about who my audiences are, I just did a three-day workshop for the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice/ National Judicial Institute, teaching 60 newly appointed judges about my area of law. Judges are an audience you often think of as already being experts. And they are. But when you’re newly appointed, you’re encountering areas of law you may never have thought about since you were a student in law school 20 or 25 years ago. Learning is lifelong in law.
We have an Indigenous legal studies program here at Allard Law. We have between 180 and 200 students in our incoming class each year, and about 15 to 20 of those students are Indigenous. That’s a key mini public in the law school because they’re going to go back to their communities to work. They are one of the futures of law. Allies to Indigenous communities are also key for legal change in Canada. So, that’s been part of how I’ve rethought teaching one of my substantive courses, thinking about where Canada’s got to go in the future in its relations with Indigenous peoples and how we ensure that law facilitates good relations, unlike in the past.
ST: Can you elaborate on your goals and methodologies as a scholar in the field of Aboriginal administrative law?
ML: Administrative law is an area of public law that involves judges reviewing the actions and decisions of a variety of actors in the executive branch of government, all the way from the Prime Minister down to a low-level bureaucrat. It’s a very important field for the rule of law, legal accountability, and legality.
Aboriginal administrative law involves the judicial review of Indigenous decision makers, partly because of the existence of the Indian Act. It allows judges to review disputes in Indigenous communities that end up in Canadian courts. It’s different than Indigenous law. Aboriginal administrative law is state-made law that’s applied to, or imposed on, Indigenous peoples. It’s not their laws or their legal orders. It’s one of the realities of colonialism in Canada.
One of my aspirations is to try to position my area of law to try to decolonize aspects of it—I don’t think it will ever be fully decolonized—to make it less harmful, but also to recognize Indigenous legal orders and how they will be interacting with the non-Indigenous legal order. Canada is a multi-juridical state; it has more than one legal order. Canada has the original legal orders, which are Indigenous, and then the two colonial legal orders: the common law across most of Canada, and the civil law, which is in Quebec. That’s part of our national story. But law schools need to find ways to recognize and support Indigenous legal orders in a way that has not been the case in the past, when they were ignored or thought of—in an anthropological sense—as inferior. How do we make this space in law school to teach our students about this deep legal diversity? It’s very similar to how you might think about bi- or trilingualism. Where do we get the expertise? I’m not Indigenous, so how will I learn in order to make this space? This underscores being supportive of our Indigenous colleagues in the law school, who are central to their own communities, but also to the teaching of law in law school. Law school should be supportive of the continuing revival of Indigenous legal orders, not undermining them.
I think that’s a key future project for all law schools in Canada, but it’s particularly salient in B.C. The university is on Musqueam land. There are several Indigenous communities around and in Vancouver, and because colonialism came late to B.C., many of the legal orders are in some areas more intact than in the east, so there are great possibilities here. I think the universities in this province are well placed to be real supporters for Indigenous communities.
ST: Can you describe how this interest in Aboriginal administrative law intersects with public scholarship?
ML: One of my sabbatical projects was to teach an intensive course at the Law School in Melbourne, Australia, a new course that I created called Judicial Review in Indigenous peoples. It put three jurisdictions in conversation—Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. This is an emerging area of scholarship, and one that’s quite fascinating. Despite the fact that these three jurisdictions share a similar legal system and a similar colonial history, there are significant differences. Among the three jurisdictions, I was most interested in New Zealand. Their Supreme Court recently declared that Māori law, what is called Tikanga Māori, is the first law of New Zealand, the original legal order. But it has also become part of the common law, which is a quite radical change. It will mean that the common law in New Zealand doesn’t look like the common law anywhere else in the world. It will be infused with Māori laws and norms.
I’m very interested to see how that develops in New Zealand, and what lessons might be learned for Canada. It’s a complicated project, and it’s controversial, but we can learn from other jurisdictions, since almost every country in the world is dealing with the effects of colonialism. That’s a future for law and legal research that is public, at the international level, but bringing it back to the domestic.
View the timeline for administrative law in Canada, an interactive tool created by Allard Law students Meghan Zhang and Jenica Banks under the supervision of Professor Mary Liston. Funded by the UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund.
ST: What other public scholarship projects are you currently engaged in?
ML: I’ve written an article for an edited collection honouring retired Supreme Court Judge Rosalie Abella, and how important the arts and the humanities were for her and her career. She’s a big supporter of the arts in her personal life, but they’ve been foundational to her life as a judge. The story here is how law needs to rediscover its relationship with the humanities. Law has a very strong connection with economics, political science, legal history, jurisprudence, and philosophy, but we really do need to have an understanding of a variety of aspects of law that connect with the skills that the humanities develops. That’s partly why two of my law colleagues and I established the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities, because it’s not just about scholarship. It’s also about thinking about teaching, and bringing those skills into the legal classroom. Law is, in part, making arguments and telling stories. Students need to know how to write, frame arguments, and tell compelling stories.
Learn more about The Canadian Network of Law and Humanities (CNLH), co-convened by Professor Julen Etxabe, Professor Michelle LeBaron, and Professor Mary Liston.
I’m also part of a project about history and constitutionalism, and the importance of narrative theory or narratology for law. The work is about narrative strategies for rereading precedent in law, and the variety of literary devices one can bring to reading legal cases. One strategy I’m working with is this idea of retroactive continuity or retconning, which is when you have a narrative established, but it needs to be changed or supplemented or ignored. People use this in many genres, from comic books to TV series. How do you recontextualize or keep the continuity even as you’re breaking with it in narrative? How does the audience buy it? That’s a very useful set of questions for thinking about law and what goes on in law when you have to depart from precedent, or where you have to understand a field of law differently, because you may understand the history that informs that area of law differently. You may see where I’m going to go with this: There are a lot of cases involving Indigenous people that categorized as being about Indigenous laws or Indigenous legal matters initially, but they are when you reread them now, and you see this very clearly. Rereading cases is not a passive activity; it’s sometimes archival, but it’s also a rediscovery and a translation exercise. This case was about that, but actually that’s not what the claimants were really arguing; they were really arguing this, but they weren’t heard properly. That’s what that paper is about.
ST: Who are you currently collaborating with?
ML: The Justice Abella project largely came out of a conference organized by the Centre for Public Law at the University of Ottawa. I work very closely with this Centre. It’s a key hub in Canada for public law scholarship. The piece on history and constitutionalism is for a conference this fall, led by Emmett MacFarlane, a professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. It really is going to be a conversation across disciplines, between political science and law. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like that, going back to one of my other disciplines, so I’m really looking forward to it. Conference papers will form part of a subsequent edited collection.
I’m co-writing a chapter for an online casebook for constitutional law, on democratic rights, with Professor Michael Pal, Canada’s expert on the law of democracy. This will be a free online casebook accessed through CanLII, which will benefit not just our own students, but will be accessible to a larger public. It’ll be interesting to teach from it, and a great learning experience for everybody. The three organizers are Professors Richard Moon, Asha Kaushal and Howie Kislowicz. The online casebook involves constitutional law profs from across the country, so it’s a lovely collaborative exercise.
ST: One thing that really drew my attention is your publication, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Rule of Law But Were Afraid to Ask in Class. How do you address uncomfortable questions that students ask in class?
ML: One develops better sensibilities the longer one teaches. I can ask a question and not be worried when I first hear silence. When you’re a younger teacher, those silences are scary, but students need space to think. Eventually somebody decides they’ve got to fill that space, and that’s going to be a student. Or else you re-phrase the question! I believe in an inclusive classroom where everybody should feel that they can ask questions. I will admit that I don’t know the answer if someone asks me a question. I then come back the next class with an answer. Also, students teach me. I learn a lot from my students, and I tell them that. I believe in being kind and gracious; we all make mistakes. We all need to learn how to disagree properly. Law is supposed to teach us that that there’s more than one way of seeing the world. There’s more than one answer often to—at least in my areas of law—the legal questions. How do we have a good argument where we respect each other even when we very profoundly disagree? I hope law profs model that, and that it’s OK to disagree with judges. For first year students, that’s the skill to learn. It’s uncomfortable because we have a legal culture where we respect judges, and rightly so. They’re doing a difficult and important job, and yet it’s OK to disagree with the judgments to provide your own informed legal opinion. Our legal system allows that with concurrences and dissents. Students need to overcome that discomfort with providing their own legal opinion and the grounds for their opinion. That’s part of the exercise, the activity of law.
ST: We have a lot of agency as teachers to model that comfort with making mistakes. You mentioned silence. If you’re teaching multicultural students, some people might prefer to stay silent unless they know the perfect answer, right?
Can you tell us about the diversity in your classrooms and the different backgrounds students are coming from?
ML: Many are the first generation coming to university. I was the first generation from my family to go to university. I’m always aware of that because law is a place of privilege. Not everybody comes from that place of privilege. Most of our students are Canadian citizens, and being Canadian can be a place of privilege too. Many of our graduate students come from other countries, some students are children of recent immigrants, and some of our students are Indigenous and come from communities from across the country a. Law is quite diverse now in terms of identity and class. We’re still trying to be more diverse, because law represents. It’s important to have those voices and persons as legal actors. Having more diversity has been linked to better access to justice.
ST: What recommendations do you have for emerging legal scholars and law students interested in public scholarship?
ML: I have a very simple answer. I think they should check out the Public Humanities Hub. It’s such an exceptional place, an interdisciplinary home. I am so happy that this has been created at UBC. It’s really important to have this resource where you can find out about other people doing things. I hope it remains well supported, because universities are big and we all get stuck in our own buildings. I’m also part of Green College, which is another marvellous place on campus. I think these collaborative hubs are really special places where you can find out more about interdisciplinary public scholarship and the people creating it.