The NSBS Equity & Access office is delighted to announce the 2025 winner and runners up for the Race and the Law Paper Prize.
Congratulations to this year’s winner Harshini Arumugam for her paper Putting Labour Law to Work: The Imperative of Race Conscious Labour Law.
Harshini Arumugam (she/her) is an articling student at Pink Larkin. She completed her JD at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, with a certificate in Aboriginal and Indigenous Law. Harshini’s passion for advocacy and justice led her to law school, where she became involved with organizations oriented towards equity, aid, and legal advancement. Harshini was the Gender Equity Representative for the Dalhousie Feminist Legal Association and the Dalhousie Law Student Society. She volunteered for the Dalhousie Pro Bono Clinic for 3 years, focusing on immigration and refugee law. In her upper years, Harshini was a Peer Mentor for 1Ls. During her 1L summer, Harshini was a Research Assistant for the Truth and Reconciliation Committee at the law school.
Harshini hopes to use her law degree to continue to advocate for systemic changes to the law that will advance racial and gender equity.
Congratulations also to this year’s runners up for their respective papers, as follows:
- Brianna Ludlow for Applying Convergence Theory to Section 35 Aboriginal Rights in Canada
- Hannah Balba for They Knew her Only as the Maid: Federal Caregiver Pathways and the Institutional Racialization of Filipina Women in Canada
- Kristen Cooke for Water, Water, Everywhere, nor any Drop to Drink: The not so Ancient Denial of Essential Services to Upper Hammonds Plains
About the Race and the Law Paper Prize
The Race and the Law paper prize was started as an initiative of the NSBS Race Equity Committee and is still a well-supported initiative.
The Race and the Law paper prize is a paper submission competition that challenges law students to submit papers that demonstrate ‘race’ literacy insight. Submissions demonstrate confidence, ease and skill in addressing race. The essay must also consider race in a broad legal context and explicitly communicate novel insights that contribute to the emerging scholarship on race and the law.
The Race and the Law Paper Prize is sponsored by Stewart McKelvey.