Fonds F0480 - Dianne Martin fonds

Dianne Lee Martin, lawyer, advocate and professor, was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on 19 March 1945. She attended the University of Toronto, graduating with an BA (Hon) in 1973, followed by an LLB from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1976, and a LLM (with merit) from the University of London (1987). Martin began her legal career with an articling position at Toronto law firm Ruby and Edwardh and was called to the bar in 1978. She practised in the area of criminal law between 1978 and 1981 as a partner in Martin, Kainer & Fyshe and then as a partner in Martin & Gemmell from 1981 to 1989. From 1989 onwards, Martin was a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where she taught in the LLM (criminal law) programme, and also served as the Academic Director of the Intensive Programme in Poverty Law from 1989 to 1992, the director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies from 1999 to 2002, and as the director of Clinical Legal Education from 2000-2001. She was the director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 to 1997 and director of Osgoode Hall Law School's Innocence Project from 1997 until 2004.

Outside of her work at Osgoode Hall Law School, Martin was actively involved in the legal profession as a member of the Criminal Lawyers Association of Ontario (1979-1995), a member of the John Howard Society of Ontario (1981-1990), a member and director of Parkdale Community Legal Services (1989-2004), and a member of the Ontario Legal Aid Plan's York County Area Committee (1980-2004). She was a posthumous recipient of Legal Aid Ontario's Sidney B. Linden Award in 2005.

Martin was a co-author of three monographs, Criminal Sentencing Digest (1993), Principles of Evidence for Policing (1999), and The Law of Evidence: Fact Finding, Fairness and Advocacy (1999), in addition to numerous book chapters, reports and journal articles in the area of social justice/injustice and criminal law.

Martin died in Toronto on 20 December 2004.