University of Illinois: Ann F. Baum Memorial Elder Law Lecture March 6

    This year’s Elder Law Lecture (newly designated as the Ann F. Baum Memorial Lecture) will take place on Monday, March 6, 2006 at 12:30 P.M. in the Max Rowe Auditorium of the College of Law. The speaker will be Laura Watts, program director of the Canadian Centre for Elder Law Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and she will address “Parallel Systems, Second-Class Citizens: The Failure of Elder Abuse Legislation.”         The lecture will examine whether elder abuse legislation actually makes older people more vulnerable because these statutes are essentially unenforceable and their underlying assumptions are ageist, sexist, ableist, and paternalistic. In addition, elder abuse laws interfere with the principles of liberal legal theory. The lecture will focus on criminal code provisions as well as fiduciary laws and their enforcement mechanisms in Canada and the United States and will consider the proper locus of these responsibilities in a federal legal system.        

Ms. Watts founded the upcoming peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Elder Law and organized the first Canadian Conference on Elder Law that was held last October. Prior to coming to the Canadian Centre for Elder Law Studies, she handled sexual abuse and fiduciary-related cases with the Vancouver law firm of Dives, Grauer & Harper. A barrister and solicitor, she previously clerked in the Criminal Justice Division, Provincial Crown Counsel, and with the civil litigation firm of Bull, Houser & Tupper. Ms. Watts received her law degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia and her undergraduate degree from Queen’s University in Ontario.         A reception will follow the lecture in the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Pavilion.

Ed:  Thanks to Dick Kaplan for this item.