Marie-Eve Sylvestre

Marie-Eve Sylvestre is dean and full professor at the Faculty of Law, Civil Law Section, at the University of Ottawa. She holds a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard Law School.

Sylvestre’s research focuses on the punitive regulation of poverty and social conflicts related to the occupation of public spaces, including conflicts related to homelessness, street-level sex work and drug use, and political dissent. She is also interested in alternative responses to criminalization, in particular in the Indigenous context.

She has published extensively in law, criminology and geography. Her most recent book, Red Zones: Criminal Law and the Territorial Governance of Marginalized People, co-authored with Nicholas Blomley and Céline Bellot, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and awarded the 2021 W. Wesley Pue Book Prize from the Canadian Law and Society Association.

From 2016 to 2019, Sylvestre acted as the justice expert for the Public Inquiry Commission on relations between Indigenous Peoples and certain public services in Quebec: listening, reconciliation and progress. She is a member of the Quebec Bar, the Global Young Academy, and the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.