A loud voice for reform

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For Prof. Roderick J. Wood, next year marks 40 years as one of the loudest voices for insolvency law reform.

That noteworthy milestone is one of many reasons why he is the winner of the CBA’s Ramon John Hnatyshyn award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to law reform, legal scholarship, and legal research.

Throughout his career, Wood has worked to bolster Canada’s commercial legislation. A founding member of the Canadian Conference on Personal Property Security Law, he has developed recommendations on electoral reform, the role of conjugality in federal and provincial laws, and public policy and private security. He has written extensively on insolvency and regularly provides legal education to members of the profession. 

“It's a terrific honour, particularly because it recognizes legal scholarship and also law reform, which has been really a constant part of my career from the very beginning,” Wood says.

“I think it's often something that tends to be a little neglected, although it is immensely important.”

He began his career as a legal research officer with the Saskatchewan Law Firm Commission. In 1987, he took a teaching position at the University of Alberta and dove into tackling insolvency law reform. Since then, he’s been one of the most prominent voices in Canada in understanding not only insolvency law but also bankruptcy, commercial, personal property, and security laws.

“The rate of change of insolvency law is actually astonishing,” Wood says.

“I don't know any other area that changes so much so quickly. When I started in the early 80s, there wasn't even a bankruptcy course; it was a tiny little niche area that only a few firms specialized in. Then it just took off. The federal government sort of recognized that this is an important lever to economic growth, to rehabilitate financially distressed businesses.” 

Insolvency is an area of law that often has to play catch-up with technological changes and the emergence of new financial assets that didn’t exist in the past. 

Nominator Anna Lund is Wood’s colleague at the university, but she first got to know him as one of her postdoctoral advisors. Now, they both work in commercial law and overlap in bankruptcy and insolvency law. 

“When I think about his contributions, there's sort of three big ones that I think about,” she says.

“One is his work as a law reformer, which is not particularly glamorous work, but it's so important to have a functioning legal system. Throughout his career, he has had a real interest in making sure that we have coherent commercial legislation that reflects the changing nature of the world.” 

The second is his impressive scholarship. Lund says Wood has done tremendous work throughout his career to rationalize, critique, and synthesize commercial law.

“He has a number of different texts that he has either written or co-written that are really just a starting point for understanding different areas of commercial law. His bankruptcy and insolvency text is my go-to starting point whenever I have a bankruptcy question. Similarly, he is a co-author on a book about personal property security law that is my go-to in that area.”

Lund says practitioners and courts are constantly turning to Wood’s work to understand what the law is. 

Like his writing, she says Wood’s teaching career has also had an immense influence on the field.

“He has taught the core commercial law courses at U of A for decades, but has done it in a way that is really creative and engaging. I think about his upper-year corporate reorganization course, which is extremely experiential in its focus. He has students engaged in creditors meetings and court hearings, and I know that a lot of the insolvency bar in Alberta are graduates of that course, because he made that area of law come alive for them.” 

What attracts Wood to insolvency and commercial law is the opportunity to be an architect in the framework that creates that transparency and certainty for economies. 

“It's a combination of creating a structure, creating a set of rules that create predictable outcomes,” he says. 

“If people in business don't know where they stand, that's just like a paralysis; they can't really invest, they can't really be assured of outcomes. So what you really want to do is to create predictability and certainty.”

Seeing the pragmatic outcomes of his work is something he also enjoys.

“This isn't an abstract exercise. This has real-world consequences in terms of reducing the transaction costs and making it easier to invest and to know where you stand and to attract capital,” Wood says.

“It's not something one person does. It is a law reform initiative, and it's done by teams and committees of people that are working together with a common view to improve the law.”

While he’s had many accomplishments over his long career, he’s particularly proud of the Personal Property Security Act, which has grown with new technological advances and ideas. 

“I've worked on that one my entire career,” Wood says.

“I was a founding member of an organization now called the Canadian Conference on Personal Community Security Law, which basically drafted the template for the legislation that all the common law provinces use in connection with the secure transaction law reform. More recently, through the Alberta Law Firm Institute, we did a major set of amendments to deal with things like digital assets, electronic, certain kinds of electronic collateral, and further improvements to the system.”

He says it’s been gratifying to see the influence the act has had beyond this country’s borders. 

“Canada has become a noted leader internationally in that, and other countries are using the Canadian model, basing their legislation and their amendments and their rules on the Canadian model.” 

Sharing that expertise with his students and mentees has been a rewarding part of Wood’s professional journey.

“Having the opportunity to impart your knowledge to a new generation of lawyers, working with students, and seeing them obtain proficiency in a complex area of law, that is really important and gratifying,” he says.

Lund admires how Wood has created space for more junior scholars like her to pursue commercial law and that he’s “a really good community member.”

“There aren't a huge number of academics in Canada who do commercial law. It's sometimes perceived as boring or something we can just get practitioners to teach,” she says. 

“Rod models both the importance and the benefits of having academics working in the area.”

Looking ahead, Wood isn’t showing signs of slowing down. He’s working on a book with scholars from around the world on reforms to international secure transactions, and continues to inspire the next generation of insolvency and commercial law experts. As part of that, he encourages lawyers to get involved in law reform whenever possible. 

“It's so important that the laws be modernized and kept up to date, not left to become less and less relevant, to ensure that they are just and effective,” Wood says.

“It's a big ask, but it is vitally important.”