Sherri Davis-Barron
Part-time professor
SHERRI DAVIS-BARRON is counsel with the Public Prosecution Service of Canada at its Ottawa Headquarters, where she provides legal advice in various areas, including police powers, search and seizure and prosecutions under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Sherri was a journalist for many years (not too, too many). During her journalism career, she worked for various news outlets, including The Canadian Press in London, England, and The Toronto Star, before joining The Ottawa Citizen as a staff writer in 1983. During her career at The Citizen, she wrote exclusively about legal issues while covering the courts, and later developed a ‘beat’ called Social Issues, which enabled her to examine a wide range of contemporary social problems, from the plight of the poor and the mentally ill, to the manner in which the state addressed the issue of violence against women. That first career inspired her to pursue a longstanding interest in the criminal law. Thus, while working at The Citizen, she studied law at the University of Ottawa, during which time she ‘articled’ for both the Ontario Court of Justice and the Crown as part of a special law course. She completed her formal articles with an Ottawa defence firm and was called to the Ontario bar in 1999. Sherri joined the federal government in March 1999; she worked for the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP before joining the Federal Prosecution Service in 2002, which is now the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. She has taught print journalism at Carleton University and Algonquin College in Ottawa, youth justice law at Carleton University, and sentencing at the Law Faculty, Common Law, University of Ottawa. Sherri is the author of Canadian Youth and the Criminal Law, which is published by LexisNexis Canada Inc., 2009. She has also freelanced for various magazines and journals over the years, including The Criminal Law Quarterly. In addition to an LL.B, Sherri has an MA in International Affairs from the prestigious Norman Paterson School of International Affairs and an honors degree in journalism from Carleton University.