 After serving as Director of McMaster's Theme School on International Justice and Human Rights in 1996-1997, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Human Rights in Employment and became very active promoting human rights and especially the rights to organize and bargain collectively.From 2003 to 2015 the Supreme Court of Canada 
"constitutionalized" those rights and in doing so extensively cited Adams's work.For his human rights scholarship and activism, he was appointed Ariel F. Sallows Chair of Human Rights on the Faculty of Law at the University of Saskatchewan for 2009-2010.