B.A. (Northwestern), LL.B. (McGill), practicing attorney, Plante Moran.

Adv Shipley is from West Rogers Park in Chicago, IL. He attended Northwestern University on a full scholarship where he earned his B.A. in International Studies and Urban Studies. Since that time he has worked as a housing discrimination investigator, a community organizer, a union representative on behalf of property service workers, and a political organizer for the Obama presidential campaign, among others. He is a founding Steering Committee and Board Member of the SEIU International Latino Caucus (an independent Latino caucus within the Service Employees International Union); the Alianza Institute, a community organizing institute; and an independent staff union composed of himself and his fellow union employees, to which he was elected President, representing over 60 staff in seven cities. He has also been active with Reform Immigration for America campaign, the Kovler Center for Treatment of Survivors of Torture, and the Developing Government Accountability to the People (DGAP) projects in Chicago. Bill speaks French and Spanish, and recently completed an internship in public interest and human rights law with Amnesty International Canada and the Canadian Center for International Justice, where he worked on issues of aboriginal governance, freedom of information, international criminal law and Canadian extradition law.

During B.C.L./LL.B. program at the McGill Faculty of Law, he was Executive Editor of Volume 7 of the McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy and has worked for McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism as a grant writer and coordinator of the Echenberg Global Conference on Human Rights and Diverse Societies in October 2010. He has also served as a rapporteur for the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS) as well as for the Justice Gonthier Memorial Conference on Responsibility, Fraternity, and Sustainability in Law. He is the recipient of the Wainwright Scholarship and the Morris Fish Award and has been a volunteer at the McGill Legal Information Clinic and served as a McGill Student Ambassador and Law Student Association Representative on the Faculty Tenure, Promotions and Renewal Committee. Topics of interest include climate migration and transnational diasporas; transparency, corruption and good governance; access to justice and legal empowerment of the poor; technology transfer, intellectual property and the right to information; participatory decision-making of stakeholders in natural resource management/effective consultation of marginalized and indigenous communities; monitoring and enforcement of labour and environmental standards in international trade law; harmonization of international labour, international human rights, and international development law standards and procedures (in particular with respect to the UN Millenium Development Goals); Kyoto Protocol enforcement, international enforcement mechanisms and the effective integration of international law in domestic legal systems; the obligation to “extradite or prosecute” in international law (aut dedere aut judicare).”