Lee Stuesser named law school's founding dean

Harvard-educated Lee Stuesser is Lakehead University’s founding dean of law, school president Brian Stevenson announced Tuesday.

A native of northern Saskatchewan, Stuesser has been Down Under for the past four years working as a professor and administrator at Australia’s Bond University. He also spent more than two decades as a law professor at the University of Manitoba and has taught at both the University of Ottawa and Royal Roads University.

“He brings the right mix of local and international experience, as well as knowledge of the North,” Stevenson said in a release. He is the right fit for a faculty of law in the North, for the North.”

He was the clear choice, said Rod Hanley, LU’s provost and vice president, academic.

“He has the vision to implement the faculty of law’s ambitious curriculum, which focuses on natural resources law, issues related to the training and retention of lawyers in small and sole-practitioner firms and Aboriginal law,” Hanley said in the same release.

Stuesser is looking forward to the opportunity to build the school from the ground up.

“I think the law needs to serve people,” he said. “I look forward to bridging the gap between the practice of law and legal education. We can make a real difference by providing well-trained, committed lawyers able to deal with legal issues relevant to rural and remote practices.”

The release describes Stuesser as an expert in evidence, Canadian constitutional law, trial advocacy and Canadian criminal law. He has a Bachelor of Education from Brock University, an Arts HBA from the University of Winnipeg and a Masters from the University of Guelph. His textbook, An Advocacy Primer, is used in classrooms across Canada and he recently completed a second edition of the Australian textbook An Introduction to Advocacy.

“Nothing gives me more joy than to be told by a young lawyer that my advocacy book saved him in court,” Stuesser said.

Stuesser will be in Thunder Bay on June 1 and 2 for convocation, and plans to move his family to Thunder Bay in August. He’s married with three children.