Justice Nicholas Kasirer graduated from McGill University in 1985 with a Bachelor of Civil Law and a Bachelor of Laws, following a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto. In 1986, he completed a postgraduate Diplôme d’études approfondies in International Law at Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). After clerking for the Honourable Jean Beetz of the Supreme Court of Canada, he became a member of the Barreau du Québec in 1987.
From 1989 to 2009, Justice Kasirer was a professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, where he taught in several fields, including the law of obligations, property law, family law, and wills and estates law in both civil and common law. He was also a visiting professor at various universities, including the Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He served as Dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill University from 2003 to 2009.
Justice Kasirer held the James McGill Chair from 2002 to 2009 and directed the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law from 1996 to 2003. He has authored over a hundred publications in a variety of fields, including civil law, comparative law, and jurilinguistics.
Since 1990, Justice Kasirer has been secretary and member of the Editorial Committee of the Private Law Dictionary / Dictionnaire de droit privé at the Faculty of Law at McGill University. He is a member of the editorial committees of the Revue du Notariat, the Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke, the Louisiana State University Journal of Civil Law Studies, and the Revue internationale de droit comparé in Paris.
In 2009, he was appointed Justice of the Court of Appeal of Quebec. During the last 10 years, he has rendered many judgments in various fields, such as private law, criminal law, and public law, including constitutional law.
Since 2006, he has been a Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law (Paris). In 2012, the Université de Sherbrooke awarded him an honorary doctorate in law. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.