The James L. Lewtas Lecture - Is There a Consititutional Right to Die? will be presented by Joseph J. Arvay of Arvay Finlay Barristers.

Everyone is welcome to attend the talk. Lunch will be served. To RSVP, click here and enter the event code – Lewtas2012.

Arvay holds law degrees from the University of Western Ontario Law School and Harvard Law School. He has a busy civil litigation practice, but with an emphasis on constitutional and administrative law matters. Some of his landmark constitutional law cases include Egan and Nesbit: the First Supreme Court of Canada decision which established that sexual orientation is a protected ground of discrimination under the Charter; the “Little Sisters” litigation which dealt both with the powers of Canada Customs to censor sexual expression and the law of "advanced costs"; the “Surrey School Board” case involving the use of books depicting same sex families in elementary schools; the "Same Sex Marriage" litigation; Health Services which established that collective bargaining is constitutionally protected under freedom of association; Insite which established the right of addicts to supervised injection and most recently the Carter/Gloria Taylor case in which the B.C. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to physician assisted dying.

In 2012, Arvay was awarded the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association inaugural Liberty Award for legal advocacy in service of human rights and civil liberties. He has been named as one of the top 100 Best lawyers in Canada in a publication of the same name for the last three years. In 2010, 2011 and again in 2012, he was named by Canadian Lawyer Magazine as one of the top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada.