Martha Jackman

Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa, and one of the small number of Canadian legal academics who have, for three decades, sustained the argument that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects a substantive floor of social and economic rights, including a right to adequate nutrition, notwithstanding the courts’ reluctance to say so.

Why she matters here

Jackman is the francophone-adjacent Canadian counterpart to the international right-to-food scholarship. Her work has, more than once, addressed the specific question of how a right to food is to be enforced against a state that has recognized it in international instruments and refused to enforce it domestically. That is the terrain a Québécois version of the physiological rights argument would first walk on.