Coffee and Comparative Law

 

Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Shauna Van Praagh

Thursday, April 7th, 2016 @1-2pm 

Prof. Shauna Van Praagh

For this session, we were very fortunate to have Prof. Shauna Van Praagh join us to present and discuss her publication titled “Palsgraf as ‘Transsystemic’ Tort Law”, giving us an opportunity to discuss McGill’s unique take on comparative law as well as legal education with one of the Faculty’s leaders in both of these areas. 

Prof. Van Praagh is a Full Professor here at the Faculty, where she has taught since 1993. Her substantive areas of research and expertise are primarily children and law, religion and law, legal education and the private law of civil wrongs. Within each area, she adopts a methodological approach grounded in legal pluralism, a sensibility to identity-based narrative and critique, and a particular emphasis on literary sources and style. She currently teaches Extra-contractual obligations, Advanced Common Law Obligations, as well as a seminar in Legal Education. A former recipient of the John W. Durnford Teaching Award, Prof. Van Praagh has been instrumental in shaping McGill's unique pedagogical approach over the last two decades. 

 

Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Kirsten Anker

Tuesday, February 16th, 2016

Prof. Kirsten Anker

In this installment of the series, we had the pleasure of enjoying “Coffee and Comparative Law” with Professor Kirsten Anker – one of McGill’s own comparative scholars whose research interests include property, Aboriginal title, legal theory, translation studies, anthropology, education, evidence, and alternative dispute resolution. Last year, Prof. Anker received the inaugural Richard M. Buxbaum Prize for Teaching in Comparative Law, awarded to her by the Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC).

As a point of focus, Professor Anker distributed her previously-published article titled “The Truth in Painting: Cultural Artefacts as Proof of Native Title” and connecting it to her more recent work.

For those of you unfamiliar with this initiative, “Coffee and Comparative Law” is a series of short informal talks by (and talks with) different Faculty members regarding their work in comparative law. These talks serve as an opportunity for interested students to meaningfully engage with McGill’s own comparative scholars and their work. Each event involves the advance distribution of a selected text and a corresponding talk by its author, followed by an opportunity for questions and discussion over a cup of coffee! Ultimately, these sessions allow us to engage with both the process and substance of comparative scholarship with some of the field’s brightest scholars. Even should the subject matter lay outside your particular research area, these engagements offer an opportunity for questions that relate to more general issues such as method and difficulties encountered in your own comparative scholarship.

 

Coffee & Comparative Law with... Professor René Provost

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Room 102, 3690 Peel

Prof. René Provost

For this session, we had the privilege of enjoying “Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor René Provost” - a respected member of McGill's faculty who teaches and conducts research in public international law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, legal theory and legal anthropology. 

Prof. Provost will join us in discussing his "Cannibal Laws" - a fascinating piece in which he explores the tension in the association of law and cannibalism as a way of unpacking our understanding of law as a social practice. In it, he suggests there are three ways of interrogating that tension, three different 'cannibal laws' that each illustrates a unique facet of our understanding of law. He writes:

"The first cannibal law is the law that seeks to repress the practice of cannibalism. In this relation, law constructs the practice as an object to be regulated. This is an étude on the theme of regulation, and its motif is legal positivism. The second cannibal law is the law that the cannibals make. In this relation, law offers a normative framework for understanding the practice of cannibalism not merely as an irrational or depraved act, but as a part of a system of norms that fulfils a specific function. This is an étude on the theme of normative agency, and its motif is legal pluralism. The third cannibal law is the way in which legal discourse relates to other forms of social discourse. In this relation, cannibalism stands as a metaphor for the manner in which legal discourse consumes all other ways of understanding, which are digested and transformed to aliment legal analysis. This is an étude on the theme of representation, and its motif is the cultural study of legal hermeneutics."

Questions can be directed to jeffrey.kennedy [at] mail.mcgill.ca

 

Coffee & Comparative Law with... Professor Hoi Kong

Prof. Hoi Kong

Thursday, October 23, 2014

This session, we had the pleasure of enjoying “Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Hoi Kong” – one of McGill’s own comparative scholars who teaches and writes in the areas of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and Municipal Law, among others.

For us to explore and discuss, Professor Kong distributed a draft of his current work-in-progress entitled “Deliberative Constitutional Amendments”.

For those of you unfamiliar with this initiative, “Coffee and Comparative Law with...” is a new series of short informal talks by (and talks with) different Faculty members regarding their work in comparative law. These talks serve as an opportunity for interested students to meaningfully engage with McGill’s own comparative scholars and their work. Each event involves the advance distribution of a selected text and a corresponding talk by its author, followed by an opportunity for questions and discussion over a cup of coffee! Ultimately, these sessions allow us to engage with both the process and substance of comparative scholarship with some of the field’s brightest scholars. Even should the subject matter lay outside your particular research area, these engagements offer an opportunity for questions that relate to more general issues such as method and difficulties encountered in your own comparative scholarship.

 

Coffee & Comparative Law with... Professor Robert Leckey

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Robert Leckey
Professor Robert Leckey

For this session, we had the pleasure of enjoying “Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Robert Leckey” – one of McGill’s most prolific scholars and an active participant in both academic and public discourse.

Professor Leckey distributed a draft chapter of his current work-in-progress on comparative constitutional law for us to explore and discuss, writing: "This will be the final chapter of a book manuscript to be completed by end of summer. It draws together findings from a study of judges’ application of Bills of Rights in Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. I changed it a lot after presentations of the project overseas in May and I present it once more, in London, before I present to your group. So things may change further, though I hope less drastically.” Both the ongoing nature of this work and the influence of feedback that Professor Leckey has received when presenting this work overseas offered a unique glimpse into the process of comparative scholarship, and a rare opportunity for us as students to see the ‘guts’ of a project this size.

 

“Which Comparative Law?” A Talk by – and with – Prof. H Patrick Glenn

Wednesday, March 19, 2014 

H Patrick Glenn
Professor H Patrick Glenn
“Coffee and Comparative Law with...” is a new series of short informal talks by (and talks with) different Faculty members regarding their work in comparative law. While the format of these talks might vary from one to the next, the essential idea is to create an opportunity for interested students to meaningfully engage with McGill’s own comparative scholars and their work. Each event will involve the advance distribution of a selected text and a corresponding talk by its author, followed by an opportunity for questions and discussion over a cup of coffee! Ultimately, these sessions will allow us to engage with the process and substance of comparative scholarship with some of the field’s brightest scholars.

To start, we had the pleasure of our first session being “Coffee and Comparative Law with... H Patrick Glenn” – one of McGill’s most prominent comparative scholars, a former Director of the ICL, and the current President of the American Society of Comparative Law. Professor Glenn gave a talk titled “Which Comparative Law?” and invited students to consider a draft of his article “Com-paring”. As a glimpse into his talk, Prof. Glenn writes that “Comparative Law has had a long history but emerged as a separate and taxonomic discipline only in the nineteenth century. A new (old) concept of comparative law is required in a time of globalisation and interdependence.”

 

 

 

 

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