Russell Brown (judge)


Russell S. Brown is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Education and career

Russell S. Brown was raised in Burns Lake, British Columbia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of British Columbia in 1987 and a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Victoria in 1994. He also has a Master of Laws degree and a Doctor of Juridical Science degree - both from the University of Toronto.
Brown was admitted to the Bar of British Columbia in 1995 and to the Bar of Alberta in 2008. He was an associate at Davis & Company in Vancouver from 1995 to 1996 and at Carfra & Lawton in Victoria from 1996 to 2004. From 2008 to 2013, he was associate counsel to Miller Thomson. From 2004 to 2013, Brown was a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta, both as a professor and for the last two years as an associate dean. His main areas of practice were commercial law, medical negligence, personal injury, insurance law and trusts and estates.

Published work, opinions

Brown is the author of a treatise on claims under negligence law for economic loss, as well as the author or co-author of over 30 published law review articles, book chapters and review essays on tort law, property law and civil justice.
In addition, while a member of the University of Alberta's Faculty of Law, Brown published posts on the faculty's blog expressing his views on a number of topics. He called the Canada Health Act “an inappropriate intrusion into sacrosanct provincial swimming pools,” referred to third party election spending limits as "odious" and "restriction on private expenditure during elections" as "objectionable", described human rights commissions as "puritanical functionaries", and described himself as a "conservative libertarian".

Judicial service

On February 8, 2013, he was appointed to the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta. He was then appointed to the Court of Appeal of Alberta on March 8, 2014. As a Court of Appeal judge sitting in Edmonton, Justice Brown also served as a Judge of the Court of Appeal for the Northwest Territories and a Judge of the Court of Appeal of Nunavut. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada on August 31, 2015.
In June 2018, Brown wrote a concurrence when the majority found that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's determination that the Indian Act did not violate the Canadian Human Rights Act was reasonable due to judicial deference, in which he argued that the Tribunal's decision was also correct.

Personal life

He has been married since 1994 to Heidi Brown and they are the parents of two children.