Meagan Hough wins award for best thesis in Western North America

UVic Law graduate alumna, Meagan Hough, has been awarded the WAGS/UMI Outstanding Thesis Award in Humanities, Social Sciences, Education and Business (http://wagsonline.org/?page_id=174). And this is not the first UVic Law student to win this prestigious award - Adam Nott won the award last year for his thesis "Transnational Law and Resource Management: The role of a private legal system in the promotion of sustainable development in the mining industry."

Meagan completed her LLM thesis -- “Personal Recollections and Civic Responsibilities: Dispute Resolution and the Indian Residential Schools Legacy" -- in January 2015, with UVic Law Dean Jeremy Webber and Political Science professor Matt James as her supervisors.

Her nomination letter for the WAGS/UMI award summarized the significance of her very timely thesis in this way: "The objective of the thesis is highly ambitious, examining the kinds of harms that resulted from the residential schools to which Indigenous children in Canada were subjected, canvassing the range of potential recourses for residential-school survivors, reflecting on Canadians’ responsibility for the residential-schools harms, doing so in a manner that engages with Maegan’s experience of representing the Government of Canada in one of the types of legal recourses designed to address those harms, and then assessing the adequacy of the residential-school recourses. Each of these dimensions could have supported a thesis on its own. Maegan, however, took on them all, precisely because it allowed her to speak to the heart of responsibility for the harms done by residential schools and whether and how that responsibility might be discharged through legal or other proceedings."

Before attending the LLM program at UVic, Meagan was practicing law with the federal Department of Justice in Whitehorse, and her thesis drew upon her experience representing Canada under the Independent Assessment Process under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. She is now practicing law as counsel for the Military Police Complaints Commission (http://www.mpcc-cppm.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx), where she focuses on alternative dispute resolution and administrative law.