How Mona Muker Built an LLM Around Two Areas of Law

Administrative law is fundamental to tribunal decision-making, but constitutional issues can surface in the cases adjudicators hear. Even if a tribunal cannot ultimately decide a constitutional question, recognizing when one is present can be important to handling the matter appropriately. Osgoode’s Professional LLM in General Law allowed Mona Muker to study both areas within one degree.

“It just intuitively felt like the way forward for me,” she says.

Mona was already working as a decision maker in the administrative justice sector when she began the program, following earlier experience practising administrative law. She saw graduate study as an opportunity to deepen her expertise while expanding the kinds of roles she could pursue as her career progressed.

Her administrative law coursework took her further into the principles governing how tribunals make decisions and how those decisions are reviewed. In Current Issues in Judicial Review, she studied Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, the 2019 Supreme Court of Canada decision that established a new framework for how courts review administrative decisions.

Mona had read Vavilov when it was released, before beginning the LLM. Studying it in class was a different exercise. She broke down the lengthy decision, identified its legal tests and worked through when they apply.

“You have to really pull things out and kind of brief it like you would law-school-style and figure out the tests,” she says. “It was really helpful to have that in-depth case analysis.”

The instructors brought another dimension to those discussions. Mona studied with experienced practitioners, including lawyers who had appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada, giving students the opportunity to examine complex administrative law questions with people who had worked on them in practice.

Procedural fairness was a major area of study. Across her administrative law courses, Mona examined issues she encounters as a decision maker, including the duty to provide reasons, the right to an unbiased decision maker and the limits placed on decision-making authority. Because principles of procedural fairness apply across the administrative justice system, the subject was relevant beyond the practices of any one tribunal.

Mona says the depth of that coursework has made her more self-sufficient when she encounters procedural fairness questions in her work.

“If it wasn’t for the program, I would be relying on superiors or relying on people to get information,” she says. “Now I feel qualified enough to teach and train lawyers and adjudicators about what is procedural fairness in the tribunal context.”

Constitutional law gave Mona the opportunity to pursue questions that had interested her throughout her career, particularly those involving human rights, access to justice and constitutional values. She ultimately combined those interests with her administrative law studies in her intensive research paper, examining judicial deference in cases involving religious rights arising in the administrative tribunal context.

“Studying both gave me a perspective that I might not have developed by focusing on just one,” she says. “It was intellectually rewarding to be able to combine and study both areas in depth.”