Andrew Hutchison

About Andrew Hutchison

Andrew Hutchison is an associate at Gowling WLG in Hamilton, where the focus is lending and borrowing work. Dr. Hutchison came to practice from academia, after a career spent teaching and writing about contract and commercial law in South Africa.

That academic career was at the University of Cape Town, where Andrew served as an associate professor of commercial law and taught the LLB course in commercial transactions. In 2021 Andrew moved to Ontario to practise as a solicitor. A Certificate of Qualification from the National Committee on Accreditation of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada followed in 2023, and the call to the Ontario bar came in 2024.

Good faith and fairness in contracts were a thread through much of Andrew's scholarship, and in June 2020 South Africa's Constitutional Court cited several of those articles in its Beadica decision. Andrew's research also asked how commercial law works across different cultures and settings. One major project examined how unincorporated rotating savings and credit associations in Cape Town handle governance and enforcement, and an empirical study looked at the community savings and credit clubs known as stokvels.

Andrew remains an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town and an affiliated researcher with a private enterprise and law centre at the University of Manitoba. Grateful for the welcome Canada has offered, Andrew is looking forward to a new chapter in Hamilton and to getting to know the law of a second Commonwealth country.