Bruce Pardy

Expert Overview

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen’s University. He is a classically liberal legal academic and an outspoken critic of legal progressivism and the illiberal managerial state.

Prof Pardy has taught at law schools in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, practiced civil litigation at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, served as adjudicator and mediator on the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal, is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, has been a visiting fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana and at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and helped birth the Runnymede Society, a branch of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. He spearheaded resistance to and ultimate repeal of the Law Society of Ontario’s statement of principles (SOP) policy that required Ontario lawyers to attest to their ideological purity to maintain their licence to practice.

He has written on a wide range of subjects at the front lines of the culture war inside the law, including human rights and freedoms, free speech, environmental governance, climate change, energy policy, professional and university governance, property and tort theory, free markets, and the rule of law. He warned of dire consequences as soon as COVID lockdowns were imposed in spring 2020, and is one of the authors of the Free North Declaration, a call to arms to protect civil liberties from COVID irrationality and overreach.