Professor Tony Sheppard spent more than 50 years with the Allard School of Law before retiring in June of 2020.
After earning a Bachelor of Arts in English and Economics from UBC in 1964, Professor Sheppard went on to an LLB from the school in 1967. Once he completed his articles with Guild, Yule and Company, he was called to the British Columbia bar in 1969 and appointed as an Assistant Professor at UBC that same year. Professor Sheppard became an Associate Professor in 1972 and a full Professor in 1976. He also holds an LLM from the London School of Economics.
Over the course of his distinguished career, Professor Sheppard taught and researched a variety of areas of the law, including contracts, property law, taxation, trusts, banking, commercial transactions, corporate law, evidence and creditor remedies.
In addition to his teaching and research, he has served on numerous faculty and university committees during his five decades with the school, including three different periods on the UBC Senate, as a Senior Appointments Committee representative and on the UBC Board of Governors’ Advisory Committee for Electoral Area ‘A’ in 1999-2000. He was also Vice-President and later President of the UBC Faculty Association in the 1990s. Professor Sheppard was also involved with the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of BC, first as Treasurer, then as President.
Outside the university, he has served on the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada and was a Commissioner on the Law Reform Commission of BC between 1979 and 1984. In the late 1970s, Professor Sheppard took a leave of absence from the law school to join the Attorney General of British Columbia in the Office of Crown Counsel. He has also served on the Federal and Provincial Task force on Uniform Rules of Evidence and was a co-investigator on a number of projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada dealing with the legal implications of digital record keeping systems.
Professor Sheppard is the author of Fiscal Federalism for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (MacDonald Commission), and of Evidence (revised edition, 1996). In 1988, he published the volume on evidence law in the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest. Professor Sheppard has also published several articles and chapters in the areas of evidence and tax law, including Chapter 7 of Materials on Canadian Income Tax.