Ryan Beaton

Ryan Beaton is a legal scholar whose primary interests include constitutional law, Aboriginal law, Indigenous land rights, and legal philosophy. His current research focuses on the challenge posed by the evolving conception of Aboriginal title to traditional notions of state sovereignty.

Ryan is pursuing a PhD in law at the University of Victoria, while working part-time as a lawyer conducting historical and legal research as part of a team preparing an Aboriginal title claim. Ryan has appeared as counsel before every level of Canadian superior courts. In 2014-2015, he worked as a law clerk for Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin at the Supreme Court of Canada. The year prior, he was a law clerk at the Court of Appeal for Ontario. In May 2013, Ryan received his JD from Harvard Law School. On graduating, he was recognized for his contribution of over 1,000 hours of pro bono service as a law student.

Prior to law school, Ryan was a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he completed his degree in 2011. His dissertation examines the secularization of German moral philosophy in the works of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. He also holds a MSc in mathematics, having completed a master's thesis on the set-theoretic interpretation of Fregean arithmetic.

Ryan was born to Scottish parents in a francophone suburb on the south shore of Montreal, where he grew up. He is sometimes said to speak every language with an ill-defined accent. He loves to travel and to study languages. He has lived with local families in Germany, Guatemala, and India, where he studied German, Spanish, and Hindi and Marathi, respectively. Ryan is an avid runner and an occasional dodgeball enthusiast.