Serwaah Phebih received her JD upon graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2020. With an intent to become part of the legal profession from a young age, she utilized her time at law school to pursue her passion for social justice work. Through her work with Osgoode’s chapters of Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project, she gained knowledge of public interest lawyering on a global scale. Following her first year in 2018, she was put this knowledge to practice whilst working for the Legal Resource Centre in South Africa, a non-profit legal clinic that has geared itself towards serving marginalized, indigent, and landless communities across the country since the apartheid era.
Upon returning to Osgoode, Serwaah sought to apply her experience to human rights work in the domestic context, as a participant in the Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (ADIP). Here, she was tasked with conducting intake, drafting and amending human rights applications, and leading mediations on behalf of clients of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre. It is this experience that ignited her passion for labour and employment law and workers’ rights.
ADIP also led Serwaah to her position with the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic (BSCC) in 2019, where she was able to work on the clinic’s #AndMeToo project, proffering legal advocacy and support to woman-identifying persons experiencing sexual violence in the workplace. She balanced this work along with her participation with BSCC’s Criminalization of Women project, which offers legal representation to survivors of intimate-partner violence navigating the criminal law system. In her capacity as a summer student, Serwaah contributed by interviewing clients, drafting memos, and visiting court to assist in ongoing litigation.
Serwaah earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and English Language and Literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2017, graduating with distinction.