Law Actually: Intimacy and Trust - McGill Graduate Law Conference

The Graduate Law Students Association (GLSA) of McGill University’s Faculty of Law is pleased to announce its 13th annual McGill Graduate Law Conference. Originally planned for May, the three-day conference has been rescheduled and will now take place via Zoom.

View the conference program and register to the panels that interest you.

 Places are limited. Members of the audience are highly encouraged to take part in the discussions following the presentations.

“Law Actually”: Intimacy and Trust

Law invokes seriousness. One tends to see it to be objective, and even impersonal. It “must be public, universal, and reasonable. Emotion, understood as mere inclination and based in a self-interest, individual perspective, or self-reference that cannot apply to all alike, is irrelevant and distracting to the obligation to do one's duty.” (Meyer, The Justice of Mercy, 11). To think like a lawyer is to maintain a safe distance from the issue at hand.

Yet, law permeates our relationships. Law regulates intimate issues in personal relationships (such as those with our parents and our spouses) and also professional relationships. Legal norms tend to operate on the basis that we may or may not trust each other to carry out our respective duties. This element of trust also applies to many relationships that are deemed to be of a “legal” nature, such as contracts, commercial transactions, and international relations.

This conference is an invitation to approach ‘law’ as a more intimate discipline and to engage in legal scholarship as an exercise in intimacy and trust.

Dean Maxwell and Isle Cohen Doctoral Seminar Series in International Law

The conference will be held in collaboration with the Dean Maxwell and Isle Cohen Doctoral Seminar Series in International Law, which is held in honour of the late Maxwell Cohen and his wife Isle. In 2020, this seminar will take the form of a half-day panel discussion on international law topics inspired by the conference theme.

See the Call for Submissions (deadline: 28 February 2020)