Chris Tollefson

Professor

Chris Tollefson

Chris Tollefson is Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. He has degrees from Queen’s, University of Victoria and Osgoode Hall Law School, and clerked at the BC Court of Appeal for Justices Lambert and Macdonald. Chris combines teaching and research on environmental issues with counsel work for various public interest environmental clients. His publications cover a range of environmental and natural resource topics including environmental assessment, eco-certification, and access to justice. He is co-author (with Meinhard Doelle) of Environmental Law: Cases and Materials (Carswell, 2013) now in its second edition.

Chris has played a leading role in the development of Canadian public interest environmental law.  He was founding executive director of the UVic Environmental Law Centre, a position in which he served for twenty years.  He served for fifteen years as director of Ecojustice, including four years as Chair and national President and held the Hakai Chair in Environmental Law and Sustainability at UVic Law from 2011 to 2016.

He is passionate about litigation, and about training and inspiring young litigators to take on challenging public interest cases.  Prior to joining the Faculty, Chris carried on a busy criminal defence and employment law litigation practice in Vancouver.  In more recent years, his counsel work has focused on complex public interest environmental and natural resources law cases.

Chris has appeared before all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada, and various environmental regulatory boards and tribunals. He was counsel to BC Nature and Nature Canada during both the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline hearing processes. He has won various awards for his teaching and research, and in 2014 was the recipient of Nature Canada’s Conservation Partner Award for his work leading their legal team during the Northern Gateway pipeline hearings.

In 2016, he co-founded and became the executive director of Canada’s first legal NGO focused on training and inspiring Canada’s next generation of public interest environmental litigators.  The Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation  (CELL) pursues this goal by being counsel of record on a carefully selected and closely supervised docket of public interest environmental cases that present strong experiential learning potential.