Constance Barbara Backhouse, CM OOnt FRSC (born February 19, 1952) is a Canadian legal scholar and historian, specializing in gender and race discrimination.
[4] She is a member of the board of directors for the Claire L'Heureux-Dubé Fund for Social Justice and the Women's Education and Research Foundation.
She is a Founding Co-Editor of the Feminist History Society, established in 2010 to publish a series of books exploring feminism in Canada and Quebec between 1960 and 2010.
As of 2011, Backhouse is working on a biography of Madame Justice Claire L'Heureux-Dubé, as well as a book about 100 Canadian feminist lawyers who entered the profession during the 1970s and 1980s.
Backhouse proposed a regulatory regime based on a "consensual, consultative" approach: The unintended result of the new mandatory competencies is that the social justice curriculum will suffer.