Program Overview

Established in 1995, the Ludwik & Estelle Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize is part of the University of Toronto’s Pinnacle Awards Program, which recognizes exceptional contributions by administrative staff, librarians, faculty members, and students.

Recipients of the Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize have included a wide variety of individuals who have been recognized for their scholarship, personal service to others, or activities in support of the University of Toronto’s commitment to the values of human rights, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

There are two categories of the Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize:

• Influential Leader
• Emerging Leader

2023 Award Recipients

Influential Leader

Sophia Moreau

Professor, Faculty of Law

Sophia Moreau is a Professor of Law and Philosophy. She is a moral, political and legal philosopher and a leading scholar of discrimination law, with a global reputation. With her masterful writing, she has led the field, helping scholars, lawyers and the courts to understand wrongful discrimination and justify anti-discrimination law. Despite the moral importance of addressing discrimination, in many ways it is poorly understood. Professor Moreau’s work provides a deeply illuminating path through this tangle of issues.

Her work had been widely cited, not just by law and philosophy scholars, but by the Supreme Court of Canada, Canadian Appellate Courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Her monograph, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination, won the Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize for 2022.

Professor Moreau has worked with the Woman’s Legal Action Fund, L.E.A.F., and has been a member of the Research Ethics Board at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. In 2005, she wrote a commissioned report for the Government of Canada recommending that “gender identity” be added to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination. It was added in 2017.

Cheryl Suzack

Associate Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science

Professor Cheryl Suzack has made exceptional achievements in research, teaching, and social justice advocacy with a particular focus on the writings of Indigenous women authors. She has made invaluable research contributions to Indigenous law and humanities scholarship. She has held visiting fellowships at Georgetown University, Smith College, and McGill University, and has served as a research collaborator with the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. A member of Trinity College’s Task Force on Anti-Black Racism and Inclusion, she has served as a member of Trinity College’s Board of Trustees, as an executive committee member with the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Literature of Peoples of Color in the United States and Canada.

Her award-winning publications include a co-edited collection, Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (Outstanding Scholarship Prize, Canadian Women’s Studies Association), and a monograph, Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law, which was a finalist for the Canada Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and received an honorable mention by the Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes Association. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.