Deanne Sowter
Deanne Sowter will join the Lincoln Alexander School of Law as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2025. Professor Sowter’s research focuses on family law, gender-based violence, feminist legal theory, and legal ethics. She is interested in the family justice system, including the lawyers’ role, and exploring the limitations of the applicable legal principles to examine the ways that law and the professional rules governing lawyers could be more responsive to gender-based violence.
Professor Sowter’s research has been generously supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council through a Vanier Scholarship, Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral, and a Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship - Master’s. She has also held several prestigious fellowships and scholarships, including the OBA Foundation Chief Justice of Ontario Fellowship in Legal Ethics and Professionalism Studies. Professor Sowter has published eleven peer-reviewed papers on the topics of family law, family violence, and legal ethics, and her work has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Professor Sowter’s current research considers how family violence cases are decided in family law. She is evaluating whether the accuracy of courts’ fact determination processes can be improved in parenting cases by preventing legal actors’ stereotypical reasoning.
Professor Sowter was previously a doctoral candidate and Vanier Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, as well as the McCarthy Tetrault fellow in Professional Ethics at Queen’s Law. Professor Sowter has also taught at the University of Calgary, Western Law, and Queen’s Law. She has a JD from Osgoode Hall Law School, an LLM from the University of Toronto, and she is a collaboratively trained family lawyer and member of the Law Society of Ontario.
Professor Sowter currently sits on the board of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics, and she regularly works with gender-based violence experts on community-engaged socio-legal research projects and initiatives.
"One of Lincoln Alexander Law's goals is to train law students so they are poised to respond to the access to justice crisis, and that crisis is disproportionately felt by survivors of intimate partner violence. I’m excited to join the law school community in the shared project of trying to make the world a better place, and in particular, I am looking forward to working with students who are interested in family law and ending gender-based violence."
