Karin Galldin
Partner
- Location:
Ottawa
- Phone:
613-482-2467
- Fax:
613-235-3041
- Email:
Biography
Karin Galldin wants the law, and the legal system, to acknowledge and validate an ever-expanding range of lived realities and perspectives. Understanding the power that comes from collective action, Karin joined our research law practice to contribute to the various rights-based, equity-seeking, and worker-led practice areas at Goldblatt Partners. A seasoned lawyer with both practice-based and policy experience, Karin is strategic, collaborative, and enthusiastic about learning from others. She also loves the perpetual opportunities for persuasion that are inherent to research and writing.
Prior to joining Goldblatt Partners, Karin worked in the areas of legal ethics, access to justice, and law reform at two prominent national non-profit organisations representing, respectively, Canada’s provincial and territorial law societies and the Canadian legal profession. For a number of years before that, Karin ran a feminist-identified, community-based legal practice in Ottawa, where she represented survivors of sexual violence in civil and human rights claims, litigated before various administrative tribunals on behalf of community members facing discrimination in the provision of public services or in employment, advanced the interests of sex worker advocacy groups as intervenors in the Bedford v. Canada litigation, and advised non-profit organisations and progressive employers on feminist, anti-oppressive approaches to dispute resolution and workplace safety.
Karin obtained her law degree from the University of Ottawa in 2005. She later obtained her LLM with a specialisation in Feminist and Gender Studies, also from the University of Ottawa, and published her graduate research on the responsibilities owed by social movement lawyers to their clients in the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law. Karin is a part-time professor at Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, where she has taught Canadian rights and freedoms along with professional responsibilities and legal ethics. More recently, Karin co-developed a new course on children and the law, employing a critical lens on law’s treatment of children to explore how children and youth could exert more agency within the systems that govern their lives.
Karin’s awareness of the law’s limitations is a personal one: she is a queer woman, married to her wife, raising their two children in a four-parent family with two gay dads. In addition to work that seeks to improve our current laws and legal system, Karin is also interested in transgressive legal professionalism and in transformative approaches to conflict and community-building. When not applying her skills at Goldblatt Partners, Karin can be found maxing out her library card at the Ottawa Public Library, fending off squirrels in her colourful backyard garden, and making art with her children.