Rodney H. Hayley

Rodney L. Hayley, BA (Hon) (Victoria), JD (Queen's), PhD (London), is currently a professor of law and Lawson Lundell Practitioner in Residence at the University of Victoria, where he teaches courses on class actions, civil procedure, legal process, and a legal history course on anti-Asian laws in Canada. He is also senior counsel with Lawson Lundell LLP in Vancouver, where, throughout his career, he has practised in the area of complex civil litigation, including class actions. He is a member of the bars of BC and Saskatchewan, and has had cases in other Canadian provinces and various American states. Recently, Mr. Hayley acted for the government of Canada in a multibillion-dollar tobacco litigation (including class actions). He is a member of the editorial board of the Class Action Defence Quarterly. He is a member of the Canadian Bar Association's National Task Force on multijurisdictional class actions and was the chair of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada's committee on national class actions. In addition to teaching at the University of Victoria, Mr. Hayley has also been an adjunct professor at UBC's Faculty of Law, lectured on legal topics in UBC's Faculty of Engineering, and been a guest lecturer in the law program at Nunavut Arctic College. He has published and presented many papers on various legal topics and chaired conferences throughout Canada. As a Commonwealth Scholar, Mr. Hayley obtained his PhD degree at the University of London and went on to teach English literature at the University of Alberta, Western University, Dalhousie University, and the University of Ottawa, where he was chair of the Honours English program. He has written on 18th-century literature and other literary topics. His current legal research involves multidisciplinary subjects in literature and the law.