Long before Ritu Khullar led appellate courts across Alberta and Canada's North, she used public law to press the country toward a broader idea of equality. Khullar, the first woman of South Asian descent to become a provincial chief justice in Canada, died on September 3, 2026. She was 62.

The Alberta Court of Appeal announced her death the next day. Its tribute described a jurist who kept sight of how decisions altered the lives of people before the court. "She understood that justice is the application of law to life," the court said.

Khullar was born in 1964 in Fort Vermilion, Alberta, to Indian immigrants who taught in the Mennonite community of La Crete. The family moved to Morinville, apart from three intervening years in Jamaica. In the judicial questionnaire she later completed for the federal government, Khullar recalled that her parents raised their children as "Canadian; full stop," while she also came to value her ethnic heritage and Alberta roots.

She earned an honours degree in political science from the University of Alberta in 1985, graduating magna cum laude. After three years in Alberta's Department of Federal and Intergovernmental Affairs, she attended law school in Toronto and Edmonton and completed an honours law degree at the University of Toronto in 1991. She then clerked at the Alberta Court of Appeal and the Court of Queen's Bench.

Public law became the through line. Khullar joined Chivers Carpenter Lawyers in 1998, became a partner in 2002 and later spent eight years as managing partner. Her work ranged across labour and employment, privacy, administrative, human-rights and constitutional law. A Department of Justice Canada biography recorded that she appeared before tribunals and every level of court in Canada, including the Supreme Court.

Khullar served in several roles with the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund and represented it in Supreme Court proceedings including R. v. Ewanchuk. In her judicial application, she singled out work connected to Vriend, which advanced protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation, and LEAF's contribution to the law of consent in Ewanchuk as sources of professional pride. She also valued helping employees recover jobs or fair compensation at difficult moments.

At the University of Alberta, Khullar taught constitutional law, labour arbitration and advanced administrative law at different points between 1996 and 2017. She also served on Alberta's Federal Electoral Boundaries Commission and in the University of Alberta Senate. In a later Canadian Bar Association interview, she said, "I have always wanted to care about the work I do."

Her ascent to judicial leadership came quickly. Khullar joined the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench in March 2017 and moved to the Court of Appeal a year later. On November 28, 2022, she was named Chief Justice of Alberta as well as chief justice of the appeal courts of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. She called that service an enormous privilege and responsibility.

As chief justice, Khullar worked on the administration of justice across a vast geography and urged courts, staff and lawyers to earn public trust through their conduct. Her public record kept the deeper emphasis on careful advocacy, serious teaching, principled judging and service to people who relied on the courts.

Khullar and her spouse, Robert, had two adult sons. She told the Canadian Bar Association that parenthood taught her humility, patience, acceptance and flexibility, lessons she drew upon as a judge.

Her work remains in the Charter arguments she helped advance, the students and lawyers she taught, and the appellate courts she guided in Alberta, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories. Those contributions carry one conviction from her years in public policy through her final role: legal institutions mattered most when they met people fairly in the circumstances of their lives.