Title: Barrister, Author
Company: Gary Botting, Barrister
Location: Hope, British Columbia, Canada
Gary N.A. Botting, Barrister, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Lawyers for dedication, achievements, and leadership in extradition and criminal law, including dangerous offender law and wrongful convictions.
The law is in fact his fourth career. First, he began working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong at age 18, and upon his return to Canada two years later continued writing for the Peterborough Examiner while attending Trent University, where he was editor of the student newspaper while majoring in English and Philosophy. He earned his M.A. in English from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Alberta. While in graduate school, he became a poet and playwright—his second career—and then a teacher and eventually professor of English and creative writing—his third career. While teaching at Red Deer College, he received his M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Alberta, and later received his Doctor Juris/LL.B. degree from University of Calgary. After becoming a lawyer in 1991—his fourth career—he continued studying jurisprudence and the law, earning a Master of Laws and Ph.D. in law from the University of British Columbia.
Writing books has become his fifth career. He has written and published more than 40 books, including legal texts, poetry, plays, novels and non-fiction titles on history, biography, literary criticism, religion—and the law. His novels and plays are focused on social injustice such as radiation poisoning in Kentucky, the attacks on the twin towers in New York, unwitting incest, wrongful conviction, incorrect presuppositions (“such as the nutty notion of the universe originating with a ‘Big Bang’ on the strength of the universal redshift observed by Hubble, when it could more easily and rationally be explained by applying Einstein’s gravitational redshift to massive stellar or galactic bodies”). His novels include Campbell’s Kids, Crazy Gran, and a two-volume novel, Hirudo: A Bilogy. (“No such word, but if you can have a trilogy, you can have a bilogy.”) His legal texts include Canadian Extradition Law Practice, Extradition between Canada and the United States, Halsbury’s Laws of Canada: Extradition, and Wrongful Conviction in Canadian Law. Dangerous Offender Law will be published this fall.
As a testament to his success, Dr. Botting has received 10 Alberta Culture Playwriting Awards, and writing awards from the Edmonton Journal and the Canadian Association of Independent Scholars. For his legal scholarship, he has received federalism and federations grants, doctoral fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He was named a Paetzold Fellow by UBC in 2000, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle from 2000 to 2007. He has also received awards from the U.S. National Science Fair – International (including top prize in zoology, which gave him a trip around the world with his hybrid giant silk moths), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (who sponsored him on a trip to India), and the American Institute of Biological Sciences (who sponsored his travel throughout the United States). He also holds an M.Sc. degree in genetics and entomology. In his spare time, Dr. Botting writes novels and collects butterflies and moths.
For more information, please visit:
Contact Dr. Botting:
