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Sarah Marsden
Associate Professor
BA (York), LLB (Victoria), LLM (Victoria), PhD (UBC)
Sarah’s research focuses on migration and the laws governing work and social welfare, particularly the law’s interaction with social relations. She is the author of Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious Migrants and the Law in Canada (UBC Press, in press summer 2018), which documents the impact of migration status across multiple legal and institutional settings, including hospitals, schools, income security and employment standards. She has also published several chapters and articles dealing with temporary labour migration, and has received the Canadian Law and Society Article Prize (2013) as well as a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship (2011-2013).
Sarah also has a background in clinical legal education, having held the position of supervising lawyer for a number of years with the Law Students’ Legal Advice program housed at the University of British Columbia. She is the co-author (with Sarah Buhler and Gemma Smyth) of Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy, a new clinical education text for Canadian law schools, and has also published in the area of access to justice and lawyer competencies. In 2014, she was the sole author of a research study and report conducted to establish a foundation for the faculty’s first clinical law program.
Sarah was called to the Bar of British Columbia in 2006 and has been a member of the Law Society of British Columbia since then, including private practice in the areas of immigration, refugee, employment, and workers’ compensation law.
Publications
Books
- Enforcing Exclusion: Precarious Migrants and the Law in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2018)
- Clinical Law: Practice, Theory, and Social Justice Advocacy (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2016) (with Sarah Buhler and Gemma Smyth)
Articles
- "What We Owe Workers as a Matter of Common Humanity: Sickness and Caregiving Leaves and Pay in the Age of Pandemics" (with Eric Tucker and Leah Vosko) (2021) 57:3 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 665
- “Supports for Migrant Farmworkers: Tensions, (In)access and (In)action” (with Susana Caxaj and Amy Cohen) (2020) 16:4 International Journal of Migration, Health, and Social Care 557
- “Just Clinics: A Humble Manifesto” (2020) 32 Journal of Law and Social Policy 7
- “Who Bears the Burden of Enforcement?” (2019) 22 Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal 1
- “The Justice Gap: Seasonal Agricultural Workers and the Law in Canada” (2019) 42:1 Dalhousie Law Journal
- “Lawyer Competencies for Access to Justice: Two Empirical Studies” (with Sarah Buhler) (2017) 34:2 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 186
- “Silence Means Yes Here in Canada: Precarious Migrants, Work, and the Law,” (2014) 18:1 Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal 1
- “The Ideology of Temporary Labour Migration in the Post-Global Era” (with Catherine Dauvergne) (2014) 18:2 Citizenship Studies 224
- “Shifting the Parameters of Debate on Temporary Labour Migration: Beyond Numbers vs. Rights” (with Catherine Dauvergne) (2014) 15:3 Journal of International Migration and Integration 525
- “The New Precariousness: Temporary Migrants and the Law in Canada” (2012) 27:2 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 209. (Winner of the 2013 Annual Canadian Journal of Law and Society Article Prize)
- “Assessing the Regulation of Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada” (2011) 49:1 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 39
Book chapters
- “The Right to Work: Immigration and Mobility” in David Doorey, ed., The Law of Work (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2020) (2nd edition)
- “The Right to Work: Immigration and Mobility” in David Doorey, ed., The Law of Work (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 2016)
- “Chapter 7: Industrial Conflict” in Labour and Employment Law: Cases, Materials and Commentary, 9th edition (Toronto, Irwin Law, 2018) (with David Doorey and as a member of the Labour Law Casebook Group)
- “Government Income Support Programs” (with Tim Bailey) in M. R. Uhlemann & D.Turner (eds.), A Legal Handbook for the Helping Professional, 3rd ed. (Victoria: Sedgewick Society for Consumer and Public Education, 2005) (editorially reviewed).
Other publications
- An Examination of Clinical Legal Education Models for Thompson Rivers University, Faculty of Law (2014) (produced for the University and Faculty of Law, funded by the Law Foundation)
- British Columbia Temporary Migrants’ Legal Handbook (2011) (Produced for dissemination within the local Bar and community organizations, funded by a grant from the Foundation for Legal Research)
- Government Income Support Programs (with Tim Bailey) in M. R. Uhlemann & D. Turner (eds.), A Legal Handbook for the Helping Professional, 3rd ed. (Victoria: Sedgewick Society for Consumer and Public Education, 2005).
