John C. Kleefeld

Professor Kleefeld previously taught at the University of British Columbia, where he directed the Legal Research & Writing Program. He teaches or has taught in the areas of Torts, Civil Procedure, Class Actions, Negotiation & Dispute Resolution, and Legal Research & Writing. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London, England, a visiting professor at Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) Guido Carli in Rome, Italy, and an instructor in the Common Law and Transnational Law Program at Université de Sherbrooke and the Osgoode Professional LLM Program. Kleefeld is the 2012 recipient of the University of Saskatchewan Provost’s Award for Outstanding Innovation in Learning. Kleefeld has a BA in Economics and worked as an economic analyst for Ontario Hydro and British Columbia Hydro before taking up law. After earning his LLB, he practised for eight years with the Vancouver firms of Lawson Lundell LLP and Branch MacMaster, while completing his LLM in Alternative Dispute Resolution. He is a member of the Law Societies of British Columbia (non-practising) and Saskatchewan (practising) and an experienced mediator. He has represented clients at all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada. Kleefeld’s research interests are wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary. His work on apology and the law, for example, reviews legislation that exempts apologies from admissibility into evidence for the purposes of proving liability, and also considers the psychological and sociological research on what makes for effective apologies, and the extent to which lawyers may play a role in negotiating apologies on behalf of clients. A current research project, being undertaken with the help of JD students, is on the readability of judgments. The project involves adapting readability software and applying statistical tools to a large database of judgments to determine whether legal judgments are readable, as measured by standardized indicia of readability. He has also written and taught in the area of creativity and the law.