Nicholas Kasirer, 59, has been nominated by Prime Minister Trudeau to fill a pending vacancy on the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Kasirer is a graduate of McGill University and was a professor at McGill’s faculty of law between 1989 and 2009. He taught classes on the law of obligations, property law, family law, and wills and estates law in both civil and common law. He served as the dean of the McGill Faculty of Law from 2003 to 2009. In 2009, the former Conservative government appointed him to serve as a judge on Quebec Court of Appeal, the province’s highest court. Kasirer, said to be among Quebec’s most respected jurists, was also suggested as a possible Supreme Court pick in 2014 after the top court rejected a different Conservative appointment, Justice Marc Nadon, for a job on the bench. That decision was related to the obligatory representation of Quebec on the high court. Members of the Quebec bar or superior judiciary, by law, must hold three of the nine positions on the Supreme Court. Kasirer is poised to replace Justice Clément Gascon as one of three judges from Quebec on the high court. Gascon has said he will retire from his post early in September.
