Welcome to the Faculty: Jeffery Hewitt
September 28, 2026
By David Murphy
About Jeffery Hewitt
UVic Law is honoured to welcome Jeffery Hewitt to the faculty as associate professor. Professor Hewitt will teach Field School in Chippewas of Rama First Nation and Transsystemic Contracts this year. He previously hosted UVic Law’s Field School at Chippewas of Rama First Nation in 2024 and 2025.
Professor Hewitt’s academic interests include Indigenous legal orders and governance, art and visual culture, constitutional and international law, human rights and legal education.
Professor Hewitt received his LLB and LLM at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, which examines the role of cartographic art and historic maps of the Americas. His research questions jurisdiction: who has authority, how that authority is expressed and what happens when different legal orders make competing claims over the same territory.
Q&A
Welcome to UVic Law! Can you tell us about yourself?
Thanks. I am so grateful to be here on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory. I hope to be a good guest and honour those who have cared for these lands and waters and those to come who will carry those responsibilities forward. The trees are so big here that I am constantly reminded of my smallness. Trees are good teachers for me. I am mixed-descent Cree and working toward connections and am grateful for the many teachers around me.
What experiences in your career stand out as meaningful, and how have they shaped you?
Working with communities exercising their laws has been meaningful. There is a difference between writing about governance and jurisdiction and being in place as a community governs itself. It shapes how I teach. I am interested in how students reach a legal answer: what they notice, assume or maybe miss, and whether they can explain their reasoning outside law school. Good legal judgment requires all of that. I continue to work on it.
What do you hope students take away from your courses?
I hope students will understand law and also observe more and approach problems from different angles. That might mean working across legal traditions, being in community to learn in place, examining an image or object, sketching or explaining an idea without legal language. I want to know what changes when we use more than one method, and what students then notice about law and practice.
Can you tell us about your work with art and law and visual legal studies? What is it and why is that important for law students?
Law is overwhelmingly text-based. We teach students to read closely, but could spend more time teaching them to look closely. I use sketching not because students must draw well, but because drawing makes us slow down and decide what matters, what relates, what to leave out and how to communicate what we understand. Those are legal reasoning skills. When the method changes, relationships, gaps and assumptions often become visible in different ways.
How do you see your role in contributing to the law school?
I hope to contribute a willingness to put together things not always put together: Indigenous law and legal practice with art history, visual culture and experiential methods. UVic takes Indigenous legal orders seriously as law. I hope to participate in those conversations by asking what happens when students encounter law through place, images and objects, cases, and statutes.
What excites you most about joining UVic Law?
The JD/JID program drew me to UVic. Its commitment to Indigenous legal orders, transsystemic education and learning beyond the conventional classroom connects with how I think about legal education. I am excited to join colleagues and students already doing this work, and to explore what law, visual culture and field-based learning might contribute together. There are many conversations underway here and I want to see where they lead. Also, did I mention the trees?