BA, JD, MA candidate
Instructor
chrishardcastle@capilanou.ca
Education
MA Candidate, Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University.
JD, University of British Columbia, 2005.
BA, University of British Columbia, 2001.
Bio
Chris Hardcastle (BA, University of British Columbia, 2001) earned a BA in philosophy and a JD from the University of British Columbia and was admitted to the British Columbia Bar in 2006. Upon graduation from law school, Hardcastle worked for a large, international law firm and was involved in corporate finance transactions representing public companies, underwriters and agents with a focus on the mining and energy sectors. He also routinely advised clients on ongoing corporate and securities compliance matters, and corporate governance. After leaving his securities practice, Hardcastle maintained a sole practice advising clients on a wide range of issues including corporate/commercial matters, commercial leasing, employment law, and wills and estates.
Hardcastle is also an MA candidate at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Humanities and is currently writing his thesis with the goal of challenging the long accepted idea in Canadian law that corporations are entitled to certain rights and freedoms under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
As an instructor, my goal is to create a comfortable and fun learning environment that allows students to engage legal issues through stories. These stories allow for the introduction of legal concepts which we can then be built upon and reinforced. For me, the most successful learning environment is an interactive one where students bring their wealth of experience and knowledge to the classroom to gain an understanding of how they can view their subjective experiences through the lens of law.
I also like to present legal concepts in a multidisciplinary fashion. To that end, I show clips of movies and television shows to help students engage law in a variety of ways.
I have an interest in the intersection of corporate rights, legal theory and philosophy of language. With a background as a lawyer, I am interested in how a multi-disciplinary re-reading of Canadian legal cases that deal with corporations can lead to a fresh critique of the widely accepted idea in law that corporations have some of the same rights as natural persons. Specifically, through the field of philosophy of language, I want to examine the language that Canadian judges employ to address corporate identity and to conclude that this notion is problematic. By exposing this problem, I want to conclude that corporate rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms ought to be clawed back.