Children as Citizens

Professor Val Napoleon is the Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law and former Acting Dean of Law. She is the co-founder of the JD/JID dual degree program in Indigenous legal orders and Canadian common law and the founding director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit.

Her work has been internationally recognized for advancing Indigenous legal traditions and methodologies in areas including governance, families, democracy, gender and human rights, and dispute resolution.

Professor Hadley Friedland is a legal scholar specializing in Indigenous law, family law, child welfare law, and therapeutic jurisprudence. She helped establish the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria and served as its first Research Director. She is currently the Director of the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge, a dedicated research unit for upholding Indigenous law. Her work with Indigenous communities across Canada focuses on identifying and articulating Indigenous legal principles and supporting community-led approaches to law and governance.

She is the author of The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization.

Freya Kodar joined the Faculty in 2005, served as Associate Dean, Administration and Research from 2016 to 2021, and was appointed Dean in 2023. She is a graduate of UVic Law’s co-op program and shared the William R. McIntyre Award for academic excellence, community service and student leadership over the course of the LLB program. Before pursuing graduate studies, she articled and practiced with two legal aid clinics in BC's Lower Mainland.

Her research focuses on income and financial security across the life course, and engages disability law, pension law and policy, debtor and creditor relations, consumer law and policy, and feminist analysis of the law. She is a co-author of Law and Disability in Canada: Cases and Materials, the first Canadian textbook on Law and Disability, and co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law / Revue Femmes et Droit.