Speaker bios | Biographies des conférenciers

Rosalie Abella is a justice at the Supreme Court of Canada since 2004. She was a Boulton Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University from 1988 to 1992. Justice Abella has been active in Canadian judicial education, organizing the first judicial seminar in which all levels of the judiciary participated, the first judicial seminar in which persons outside the legal profession were invited to participate, the first national education program for administrative tribunals, and the first national conference for Canada's female judges. She is currently also Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors of the National Judicial Institute. Justice Abella is the author of over 80 articles and written or co-edited four books.

Kirsten Anker is Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Law at McGill University. She teaches in the areas of property and Aboriginal peoples and the law, and has research interests that combine property, Aboriginal title, legal theory, translation studies, anthropology, education, evidence, and alternative dispute resolution.

She is currently one of the principal researchers on a project in partnership between McGill Faculty of Law and Justice Canada, investigating the inclusion of Indigenous legal traditions in the Trans-systemic Legal Education program at McGill.

Harry W. Arthurs is University Professor Emeritus, former Dean of Osgoode Hall Law School (1972-77) and former President of York University (1985-92), He has published extensively in the fields of legal education and the legal profession, legal history and legal theory, labour and administrative law, globalization and constitutionalism. In addition to serving as an arbitrator and mediator in labour disputes, Arthurs has conducted inquiries and reviews at Canadian, British and American universities, and has provided advice to governments on issues ranging from higher education policy to the constitution to labour and employment law. Most recently he has chaired reviews of federal labour standards legislation (2004-2006), Ontario pension legislation (2006-2008) and the funding of Ontario’s workplace safety and insurance system (2010-2012).

Arthurs’ contributions have been recognized by his election as an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He has been awarded the Canada Council’s Killam Prize for his lifetime contributions to the social sciences (2002), and both the Bora Laskin Prize (2003) and the Labour Law Research Network prize (2113) for his contributions to labour law. He was also co-winner (with Joseph Stiglitz) of the ILO’s Decent Work Research Prize (2008). He has received honorary degrees from a number of Canadian universities.

Blaine Baker is a graduate of the Western Ontario and Columbia law schools, and was a Bigelow Fellow in Law at the University of Chicago. He has taught in McGill’s Faculty of Law for the last thirty years. During that time he has also been a visitor at the Toronto and Osgoode Hall law schools. Professor Baker is primarily a Canadian legal historian, although he has taught Contracts and Administrative Process in almost every year of his appointment. He served two terms as Associate Dean at McGill, and has thrice been the recipient of University teaching excellence awards. His most recent book-length publications, both published by the University of Toronto Press, are (with Donald Fyson) Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Quebec and the Canadas (2013) and (with Jim Phillips) A History of Canadian Legal Thought: Selected Essays (2006). Professor Baker also acts for the Attorney General of Ontario as a Superior Court Mediator and a Financial Services Commission Arbitrator.

Jean-Guy Belley is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal. His teaching and research interests are in contract law and general theory of law from the perspectives offered by the social sciences, mainly sociology and economic analysis of law. A former Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Law in Society Program then under the leadership of Prof. Rod Macdonald), he has edited the collective book « Le droit soluble » ( Paris, LGDJ, 1996 ) and a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society on « Legal Pluralism ». Another special issue of the same journal has been published around Prof. Belley’ s scholarship in 2011 (volume 26, number 2). A recent paper by Prof. Belley entitled « The Protection of Human Dignity in Contemporary Legal Pluralism » has been published in the collective book edited by R. Provost and C. Sheppard of the McGill Centre on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism: « Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism », New York, Springer, 2013.

Suzanne Bouclin is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, French Common Law section. She holds a doctorate in Law from McGill University, written under the supervision of Rod Macdonald. Her research examines law through the lexicon, theories and methods of film studies.

Professeure Bouclin a effectué son stage en droit au sein d'un cabinet spécialisé en contentieux constitutionnel à Toronto et a été admise au Barreau du Haut-Canada en 2002.  Elle fait également partie de regroupements communautaires voués à la justice participative et compte parmi ses domaines d'enseignement et de recherche : les règlements des différends, le droit et la justice sociale, le droit et la culture populaire et la réglementation criminelle des groupes vulnérables.

Michael Bridge is Cassel Professor of Commercial Law at the LSE, as well as Professor Law at the National University of Singapore. Before coming to the LSE in 2007, he held chairs in law at McGill University, the University of Nottingham and UCL, and was Dean of the Faculty of Laws at UCL. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Leeds, Malaya, Hong Kong, Mainz, Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland and at Monash University. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Bridge teaches contract, secured transactions, international and domestic sale of goods, uniform law, private international law, comparative private law, personal property law.

He is the author of many books, the most recent ones being The Law of Personal Property (with L Gullifer, G McMeel and S Worthington) (Sweet & Maxwell, 2013), The International Sale of Goods (Oxford University Press, 3rd edn 2013), The Law of Security and Title-Based Financing (with H Beale, L Gullifer and E Lomnicka) (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2012), The Sale of Goods (Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 2014).

Kim Brooks is the Dean at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.  She previously served as an associate professor and the H. Heward Stikeman Chair in the Law of Taxation at McGill University.  Kim teaches all areas of tax law including individual taxation, corporate tax, and international tax.

Nathalie Des Rosiers is a constitutional law expert. She recently served as the General Counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, (CCLA) a national organization that acts as a watchdog for the protection of human rights and civil liberties in Canada. In that capacity, she has appeared in front of Parliament and various legislative bodies to defend the rule of law and constitutional protections.  Prior to her appointment to the CCLA, Professor Des Rosiers was Interim Vice-President - Governance for the University of Ottawa (2008-2009), Dean of the Civil Law Section, University of Ottawa (2004-2008), President of the Law Commisison of Canada (2000-2004).

She has received many honours, including the Order of Canada in 2013, the Order of Ontario in 2012, an Honorary Doctorate from the UCL (Université catholique de Louvain) in Belgium and the Law Society of Upper Canada,  and was named one of Canada's 25 most influential lawyers in both 2011 and 2012.

Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens is Associate Dean, Research, and Canada Research Chair in North American and Comparative Juridical and Cultural Identities at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montreal. He has also taught at the faculties of law of the University of Toronto and of McGill University, in addition to having been visiting professor at different universities outside of Canada (Aix- Marseille, Science Po, Case Western).

His teaching and research interests are constitutional law (domestic and comparative), civil liberties, legal theory and epistemology, and the sociology of legal cultures. His work currently focuses on the legal treatment of religious claims in multicultural liberal societies, on the relations between the civil law and common law traditions in a globalized economy, and on the legal theory of federalism.

Professor Gaudreault-DesBiens is a member of the Québec and Ontario Bars. He serves as the Canadian correspondent for the British journal Public Law.

H. Patrick Glenn holds the Peter M. Laing Chair at the McGill Faculty of Law. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. His books include Legal Traditions of the World (5th ed., forthcoming 2014, OUP).

H. Patrick Glenn est titulaire de la Chaire Peter M. Laing à la Faculté de droit, Université McGill. Il est membre de la Société Royale du Canada et de l'Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé. Il a écrit notamment Legal Traditions of the World (5e éd., à paraitre 2014, OUP).

Alison Harvison Young was appointed to the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario in 2004. At the time of her appointment, Harvison Young was Professor and the Dean of the Faculty of Law at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario . She was a member of the Faculty of Law of McGill University from 1988-1998, during which period she taught a range of courses including Foundations of Canadian Law, Remedies in Contract and Tort, Judicial Review of Administrative Action, as well as Family Law and related subjects. In 1997 she was the recipient of the John W. Durnford Teaching Excellence Award. During her years at McGill, and was also the recipient of the of the David Watson Memorial Award (with Rod Macdonald) in 1991. She also served as Associate Dean (Academic) from 1993-1995.

Harvison Young earned LL.B. and B.C.L. degrees from McGill University in 1983 and served as law clerk to the Honourable Justice W.Z. Estey from 1983-1984. She obtained a B.C.L. from Oxford University in 1988.

Richard Janda is an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Law at McGill University, a Hydro Quebec Scholar in Sustainable Development Law and an Associate Member of McGill School of Environment. He was a Research Assistant to Rod Macdonald, a position he occupies to this day.

Rosalie Jukier, B.C.L., LL.B (McGill), B.C.L. (Oxon), is a professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University and a member of the Paul André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law.  She teaches and conducts research in the areas of comparative private law, focusing on Contracts and Remedies, Judicial Institutions and Civil Procedure, the intersection between human rights and private law, judicial methodology and legal pedagogy. The recipient of faculty and university teaching excellence awards, she has also served as senior advisor to the National Judicial Institute, an organization dedicated to the development and delivery of legal education for judges.

Daniel Jutras is the dean of the Faculty of Law at McGill University since 2010. He also holds the Wainwright Chair in Civil Law. He first joined the Faculty of Law in 1985, after earning law degrees at Université de Montréal and Harvard. He is a former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law and has served as Associate Dean (Admissions and Placement), and Associate Dean (Academic) in the Faculty.

Professor Jutras' teaching and research interests are in civil law and comparative law, and he now conducts research in the law of obligations from a trans-systemic perspective. He is also pursuing a few research projects on judicial institutions and civil procedure.

In 2013, Professor Jutras was appointed by the Supreme Court of Canada to serve as amicus curiæ in the Reference on the Reform of the Senate of Canada, and was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Nicholas Kasirer taught at the Faculty for over twenty years following his appointment as assistant professor in 1989, under Rod Macdonald's deanship. He was Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre from 1996 to 2003 and Dean of Law from 2003 to 2009. Since 2009, he has been a judge on the Quebec Court of Appeal.

Alana Klein is Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Prior to joining the Faculty, she was a senior policy analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. She has taught also at Columbia Law School and Columbia University.

She teaches and researches in health law, criminal law, human rights, and Canadian and comparative constitutional law. The position of marginalized groups and individuals in decentralized and privatized systems and the role of accountability requirements in governance and decision-making are primary preoccupations in her research.

Professor Dr Martha-Marie Kleinhans joined the University of Reading's School of Law in 2002 from a previous career in film and community radio. Educated in Quebec and the United States, she brings a diverse personal and juridical background to her research and teaching. Her pioneering work in teaching and learning has been recognized by her having been shortlisted for the prestigious UK Law Teacher of the Year Award in both 2009 and 2010. She has been awarded a University Teaching Fellowship and has served as Associate Dean, Teaching & Learning from 2008 until being appointed Vice-Provost of the University of Reading's first overseas branch campus in Malaysia in 2011. As Vice-Provost, Professor Kleinhans brings her global experience and outlook to her work to establish a campus, which will award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in: the built environment; business and law; and, the sciences of pharmacy and psychology.

Hoi Kong is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, where he has taught since 2009. Hoi Kong teaches and researches in the areas of Constitutional Law, Comparative Law, Administrative Law, and Municipal Law.

From 2002 to 2003, he was law clerk to Justices Marie Deschamps and Claire L’Heureux‐Dubé at the Supreme Court of Canada. From 2003 to 2006, he was an Associate‐in‐Law at Columbia University, and from 2006 to 2009, he was an Assistant Professor of Law, cross‐appointed with the School of Urban and Regional Planning, at Queen’s University. Kong studied at McGill University (B.A., M.A., B.C.L./LL.B.) and Columbia University (LL.M., J.S.D).

In May 2013, during Convocation ceremonies for the Faculty of Law of McGill University, Professor Kong was awarded the John Durnford Award for Teaching Excellence by the Law Student Association. He was named a Hydro-Québec Scholar in Sustainable Development Law in 2012.

Nicolas Lambert teaches contract law and administrative law at the Université de Moncton, New Brunswick. He holds a doctorate in law from McGill University, where he studied “The Impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on Canadian Administrative Law”. He did his undergraduate studies in law at the University of Strasbourg in France and at the London School of Economics in the UK. His research seeks to bridge disciplinary gaps such as the border between constitutional and administrative law and administrative and contract law. He has published on questions such as the powers of administrative bodies under the constitution, the nature of Federal Court jurisdiction and the rights of contractual employees in the public service.

Diplomée et droit et en sciences politiques des universités de Montréal et d'Oxford, Andrée Lajoie est, depuis 1968, professeur à la Faculté de droit de l'Université de Montréal, où elle a poursuivi, dans le cadre du Centre de recherche en droit public dont elle a été directeur de 1976 à 1980, une carrière de recherche.  Axés d'abord sur le droit constitutionnel et administratif  —appliqués à des champs variés traversant le domaine urbain, et celui de la santé et de l'enseignement supérieur—  ses travaux ont porté plus récemment sur la théorie du droit (pluralisme, herméneutique), induite notamment à partir de corpus de droit constitutionnel reliés notamment au rôle du pouvoir judiciaire dans la production du droit et aux droits des minorités.  Ses travaux récents portent en particulier sur le droits ancestraux des Autochtones au Canada, et ella a continué de publier depuis sa fausse retraite, notemment, en 2009:  Vive la recherche libre, aux Éditions Liber, et une biographie du Chf autochtone Ghislain Picard.

Robert Leckey is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Faculty of Law and Paul-André Crépeau Centre of Private and Comparative Law, McGill University.

Professeur titulaire, Université de Montréal. LL. B. Montréal 1985;  LL. M. Montréal 1990 (récipiendaire de la bourse Duff-Rinfret).  Professeur titulaire depuis 2002 ; Professeur agrégé, U. de Montréal, 1996-2002; Professeur adjoint, U. de Montréal, 1991-1996; chargé de cours, U. de Montréal, 1989-1991; Professeur invité Centre Urbanisation Culture Société de l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique (2011-2015), clerc auprès d’un juge de la Cour fédérale, division d’appel, 1986-1988; membre du Barreau du Québec depuis 1987.  Lauréat de la Fondation Pierre Elliott Trudeau 2013. Sujets d’enseignement et de recherche: épistémologie et théorie du droit, histoire du droit canadien, droit constitutionnel (fédéralisme et droits fondamentaux), droits des  autochtones. Membre fondateur de la troupe de théâtre Les Veilleurs de Nuit.

Wade MacLauchlan is President Emeritus of the University of Prince Edward Island, where he served as President from 1999 to 2011. Previous positions include Dean of Law at the University of New Brunswick, professor of law at Dalhousie University, and visiting professor at McGill and other universities.

Wade’s teaching and research have focused on administrative and public law, plus eight years as director of the common law-civil law exchange program. In 2014, he will publish Alex B. Campbell: Prince Edward Island Premier Who Rocked The Cradle, a political biography of PEI’s longest-serving premier and an account of an era [1966-78] of progressive policy development, institution building and intensive federalism.

Wade lives at West Covehead PEI and is an elected member of the North Shore Community Council, a board member of the Federation of PEI Municipalities, a Trudeau Foundation Mentor, and chair of the Medavie Health Foundation. He is involved in several business ventures, including Anne in China Inc., which has introduced a new Mandarin translation of Anne of Green Gables to China.

In 2013, Wade co-chaired the Georgetown Conference on Redefining Rural, and in 2014 will be co-chair of a conference on early learning as a public policy priority. Wade is a Member of the Order of Canada, and has been awarded the IPAC Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Public Service Leadership.

Professor Desmond Manderson is an international leader in interdisciplinary scholarship in law and the humanities. He is the author of several books including From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice (2000); Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law (2006); and Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law—The legacy of modernism (2012). His work has led to essays, books, and lectures around the world in the fields of English literature, philosophy, ethics, history, cultural studies, music, human geography, and anthropology, as well as in law and legal theory. Throughout this work Manderson has articulated a vision in which law's connection to these humanist disciplines is critical to its functioning, its justice, and its social relevance. After ten years at McGill University in Montreal, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse, and was founding Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, he returned to Australia to take up a Future Fellowship in the colleges of law and the humanities at ANU.

John D. McCamus is a Professor of Law and University Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, a faculty which he served as Dean from 1982-1987. His educational background includes degrees in philosophy from the universities of Western Ontario and Toronto and in law from the universities of Toronto and London. Prior to joining the faculty at Osgoode, he articled with the Toronto law firm, Fasken and Calvin, and served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada for Chief Justice Laskin. At Osgoode, his principal areas of research and teaching have included private law, especially restitution and contract, commercial law and information practices law. His published work includes two texts, The Law of Contracts (2005) and The Law of Restitution 2d ed. (2004), the latter volume co-authored with P.D. Maddaugh.

While Dean of Osgoode Hall, Professor McCamus served as Chair of the Committee of Ontario Law Deans and of the Committee of Canadian Law Deans. He is the recipient of the Mundell Medal for Excellence in Legal Literature (A.G. Ont.), the Walter Owen Book Prize (Can. Bar Assoc.) the Law Society Medal and an LL.D. (Hon.) from the Law Society of Upper Canada. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2006. He is an experienced adjudicator in human rights and labour disputes and served as a Vice-Chair of the Ontario Crown Employees Grievance Settlement Board from 1987-1996. He has served as an arbitrator in commercial disputes. He is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Professor McCamus served, from 1993 to 1996 as Chair of the Ontario Law Reform Commission. From 1994 to 1996, Professor McCamus also served as Co-Chair of a committee on fundamental issues for the Ontario Civil Justice Review, a joint task force of the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ontario Court (General Division). In December of 1996, Professor McCamus was appointed by the Attorney General of Ontario to chair the Ontario Legal Aid Review, an independent task force established to examine the legal aid system in Ontario and make any recommendations considered appropriate with respect to its reform. The Review's three-volume report, A Blueprint for Publicly Funded Legal Services was published in September, 1997. In 2007, McCamus was appointed by the Province as Chair of the Board of Directors of Legal Aid Ontario. In 1998, Professor McCamus was appointed by the American Law Institute to the Advisory Committee for the now recently published Restatement of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment 3d (2011). In 2007, he was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. He is currently an Associated Scholar in the Toronto office of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP.

Thomas McMorrow is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, where he teaches Family Law, Introduction to Public Law, Family Mediation, and Human Rights Mediation. Professor McMorrow’s research interests include legal theory, legal pluralism, property law theory, education law, and legal education. He is currently carrying out an empirical study examining the relationship between the informal, educational setting of a community-based support group and family law.

Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University, Faculty Co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law, and past president of the American Ethnological Society. She is the author or editor of eleven books and special journal issues and over one hundred articles. Her recent books include Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000), Human Rights and Gender Violence (Chicago, 2006), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwells, 2009) and The Practice of Human Rights, (co-edited with Mark Goodale; Cambridge, 2007). She received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. In 2013 she received an honorary degree from McGill School of Law and was the focus of an Author Colloquium at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She is an adjunct professor at Australian National University. She is currently writing a book on indicators as a technology of knowledge used for human rights monitoring and global governance.

Yves-Marie Morissette is a member of the Quebec Court of Appeal. A graduate of the Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal, he completed a Bachelor of Political Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a first degree in law at the University of Montreal. In 1973, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and began a D.Phil. in law at the University of Oxford (Exeter College) which he completed in 1977. He joined the Bar of Quebec that same year and became an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law of McGill University. During his academic career, he taught among other subjects Administrative Law, Evidence and Comparative Law, and was Associate Dean (1987-1989) and Dean of the Faculty (1989-1994). At the time of his appointment to the Court of Appeal in November of 2002, he held the Arnold Wainwright Professorship of Civil Law at McGill and was Director of the Institute of Comparative Law. Prior to his appointment, he had been, inter alia, President of the Quebec Law Teachers' Association, Chair of the Council of Canadian Law Deans and Vice-President of the Quebec Bar Foundation. His many publications in public law, private law and comparative law appeared in Canada and abroad, and he was a visiting professor, guest lecturer or speaker at universities and conferences in Canada, the United States, France, Vietnam and the People's Republic of China.

Pierre Noreau est professeur à la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal et chercheur du Centre de recherche en droit public, Centre dont il a été le Directeur de 2003 à 2006. Il est politologue et juriste de formation et travaille plus particulièrement dans le domaine de la sociologie du droit. Pierre Noreau a été Président de l’Association francophone pour le savoir (l’ACFAS) de 2008 à 2012, Directeur du Bureau des Amériques de l’Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) de 2009 à 2013 puis Vice-recteur à la programmation et au développement de l’AUF de 2011 à 2013. Ses recherches portent notamment sur le fonctionnement et l’évolution du système judiciaire, le règlement non-contentieux des conflits, l’accès à la justice, la diversité ethonoculturelle et la gouvernance autochtone. Ses publications récentes explorent les questions entourant la déontologie judiciaire, la justice communautaire, l’évolution du champ de l’intervention pénale et les conditions de la recherche interdisciplinaire en droit. Pierre Noreau détient un doctorat de l’Institut d’Études politiques de Paris.

Eric H. Reiter is an associate professor of the Department of History at Concordia University.

Education: BA Cornell; MA, PhD Toronto; LLB, BCL, LLM McGill; member of the Barreau du Québec

Brief Academic Biography: My research and teaching focus on historical and comparative aspects of law in Quebec, Canada, and beyond. I am currently working on a study of the ways in which intangibles like honour, propriety, grief and other values were narrated and litigated before the Quebec courts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have also published recently on neighbourhood conflicts in nineteenth-century Montreal, on conflict resolution, on transitional justice, on privacy law, and on the uses of history in Aboriginal rights litigation.

Guy Rocher, Ph.D. (Harvard) est sociologue, a enseigné la sociologie à l’Université Laval (1952-1960), a été professeur titulaire au Département de sociologie (de 1960 à 2010) et chercheur au Centre de recherche en droit public de la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal (de 1979 à aujourd’hui). Il est maintenant professeur émérite et aussi professeur associé à la Faculté de droit de l’Université de Montréal. Il a été membre de la Commission royale d'enquête sur l'enseignement (Commission Parent) (1961-1966) et a participé à la rédaction du Rapport de cette Commission. Il a aussi été sous-ministre au développement culturel et au développement social, au Conseil exécutif du Gouvernement du Québec (1977-1982). Dans cette fonction, il a participé à l’élaboration et à la mise en application de la Charte de la langue française (1977). Il a publié de nombreux articles et une vingtaine d’ouvrages, entre autres une Introduction à la sociologie générale, Le Québec en mutation, Études de sociologie du droit et de l’éthique et, en collaboration, Entre les rêves et l’histoire, Théories et émergence du droit et La Loi 101 et l’école primaire à clientèle pluriethnique.

Kristen Rundle recently joined the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales as a Senior Lecturer, following four years at the Department of Law, London School of Economics and Political Science. She has also taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Sydney. Kristen's teaching areas include administrative law, legal theory, and law and the Holocaust, and her research explores the relationship between the form of law and human agency from both a theoretical and practical standpoint. Deriving from her work on the late American legal philosopher, Lon Fuller, she is especially interested in the conditions we associate with being a legal subject, and law's role in constituting as well as mediating circumstances of vulnerability. These questions have informed her research across a range of areas including law and the Holocaust, British child migration to Australia, and now also her work on contracted-out state power in conditions of high vulnerability. Kristen was awarded an SJD from the University of Toronto, where she also held the Doctoral Fellowship in Ethics at the Centre for Ethics. She undertook an LLM (honours) at McGill University as the 2001 Australian Lionel Murphy Postgraduate Overseas Scholar, and also holds a BA/LLB (first class honours) from the University of Sydney. Kristen's book, Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L Fuller (Hart Publishing, 2012) was awarded second prize, Society of Legal Scholars UK Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, 2012, and was dedicated to Rod Macdonald.

David Sandomierski is an SJD candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. His dissertation explores how legal education understands and conveys the concepts of citizenship and professionalism.  David completed his  LL.B. and B.C.L. degrees at the Faculty of Law at McGill University, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Law Journal. He then served as law clerk to the Chief Justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin.  While working on his dissertation, David teaches Legal Inquiry in the Arts & Science Program at McMaster University and Legal Research and Writing at the University of Toronto.

Ralph Lloyd Simmonds was appointed to the Court on 23 February, 2004. Born in Sydney, NSW, in May 1950, he was educated at Nedlands Primary School & Christ Church Grammar School in Perth.

Justice Simmonds graduated with a Bachelor of Laws with Honours from the University of Western Australia in 1972 and a Master of Laws from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1976.

He was admitted to practice in Western Australia in 1974, having served articles at Muir Williams Nicholson & Co (now Freehills). Justice Simmonds taught law at the University of Windsor, Ontario, from 1976 - 1979 and McGill University, Quebec, from 1980 - 1989.

He returned to Australia in 1990 to become Foundation Dean (position held between 1992 and 1995 and 1997 till November 2003) and Foundation Professor of Law at Murdoch University, Perth. Justice Simmonds was a member of the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia from 1997 and its Chair from 2001. He served as National Convenor of the Committee of Australian Law Deans (peak body for Australia’s law schools) from 1994 - 1995.

Angela Swan is counsel to the firm of Aird & Berlis LLP.  She is a member of the Corporate Finance and Corporate/Commercial Groups. She was previously a partner at the firm and an associate at a national firm in Montreal.

  Angela's practice focuses on supporting lawyers with respect to research and opinions. She is particularly experienced in contract law and consults with members of the firm on many legal issues, including corporate transactions and civil and commercial litigation.  Angela stays involved with the firm's practice groups in order to provide topical information on recent case law.  She believes in a practical approach to resolving legal questions and in ongoing legal education.  Angela is a well-published author of a number of papers, reviews, books, case comments and annotations in regards to matters such as contract law, civil litigation and conflict of laws.  She is frequently retained by other law firms as an expert witness in connection with matters pertaining to the law in Ontario.

Angela taught at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto for almost 25 years before going into practice.  She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Victoria.  She taught at the Faculty of Law at McGill University from 1996 to 2002 and has been an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, since 2003 where she teaches courses on Commercial Law.

Angela was the Thesis Supervisor for Rod MacDonald when he did his LLM at U of T in 1975. She still has a copy of his thesis.

Stephen J. Toope is President and Vice-Chancellor, the University of British Columbia. A former President of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and Dean of Law, McGill University, Professor Toope also served as Law Clerk to the Rt. Hon. Brian Dickson, of the Supreme Court of Canada. He publishes in leading international journals on international dispute resolution, international environmental law, human rights, the use of force, and international legal theory. His most recent book with Jutta Brunnée, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2010) won the American Society of International Law’s 2011 Certificate of Merit for Creative Scholarship.

Shauna Van Praagh is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, where she has taught since 1993 and served as Associate Dean, Graduate Studies in Law from 2007 to 2010. A graduate of University of Toronto (BSc 1986, LLB 1989) and Columbia University (LLM 1992, JSD 2000), she clerked for the Right Honourable Brian Dickson, Chief Justice of Canada, in 1989-1990. At McGill, she has taught Extra-Contractual Obligations/Torts and Advanced Common Law Obligations, Foundations of Canadian Law, Graduate Legal Methodology, and seminars in Children and Law, Social Diversity and Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Legal Education. Areas of research and writing include religious communities and law, children and the law of civil wrongs, comparative legal traditions and methodology, law and literature, and stories in legal education. She has been involved in the design and implementation of innovations in programmes and pedagogy at McGill, both at the Bachelor’s level and at the LLM/Doctoral level, and is active in McGill’s Institute for Comparative Law, Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and Paul Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law.

Jacques Vanderlinden never learned Law, but began observing and studying laws in Western European history (and occasionally beyond) in 1953. He then turned his attention to African colonial laws on a comparative basis in 1956 and to « originally African » (a term he coined) laws in 1959, having just started a teaching career. Ten years later, he accepted, by moral necessity (and at the same time learning that such concept existed), to prepare the descriptive synthesis of papers prepared for an aborted conference on the subject of legal pluralism. At that time, he had taught Law in Addis Ababa (5 years), Boston (1 semester), Edinburgh (2 semesters), Kinshasa (2 years), combining these assignments with his regular courses at the Free University of Brussels in African, American and European institutions and laws in a contemporary or historical perspective. He retired from the Free University of Brussels at age 60 as a professor emeritus and received the same title from the University of Moncton after 17 years devoted there to the teaching of the common law in French, Amerindian law and the legal history of Acadia. He definitely retired in 2008. He was once truly described as a butterfly in the constellation of laws and some absent-minded persons elected him a full fellow of the Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences and the International Academy for Comparative Law, as well as a foreign fellow of the Italian Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. His inmost self is that of a skeptical student and teacher, certainly not of of what one calls a scholar, a learned man, nor a master.

Catherine Walsh is a professor in the Faculty of Law of McGill University. She teaches and writes principally in the areas of secured transactions law and private international law. Catherine is the co-author, with Ronald Cuming (University of Saskatchewan) and Roderick Wood (University of Alberta), of Personal Property Security Law (Irwin Law, 1st ed. 2005, 2nd ed. 2012). She has been actively involved in a number of Canadian and international law reform initiatives, including serving on the Canadian delegation to the secured transactions law working group of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law.

Jeremy Webber is Dean of Law at the University of Victoria. He has held the Canada Research Chair in Law and Society in the Faculty of Law of the University of Victoria since 2002. In 2009 he was appointed a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation. Prior to joining the University of Victoria, he was Dean of Law at the University of Sydney (1998-2002) and Professor of Law at McGill University (1987-1998). Professor Webber is widely recognized in the areas of constitutional law, cultural diversity, constitutional theory, federalism, and indigenous rights, in Canada and in comparison to other countries (especially Australia). He is the author of Reimagining Canada: Language, Culture, Community and the Canadian Constitution.

John Whyte is a Policy Fellow at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School at University of Regina. He taught constitutional law at the Queen's University Faculty of Law between 1969 and 1997 and served as Dean of Law from 1987  to 1992. He served as director of constitutional law from in the Saskatchewan Department of the Attorney General from 1979 to 1992 advising Saskatchewan in the constitutional reform process. He returned to Saskatchewan in 1997 and served as deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general until 2002. He recently received an honorary doctorate from York University, Toronto.

Robert Wolfe is Professor in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University. A graduate of York University, he was a foreign service officer for many years, serving abroad in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1977-79) and in the Permanent Delegation of Canada to the OECD in Paris (1981-85). His Ottawa assignments included the National Security Section, the Uruguay Round negotiation team and the G-7 Summits team. After completing a doctorate in Political Studies, he joined Queen’s in 1995, where he teaches policy analysis and trade policy in the MPA program; he also directs the Queen's Annual Institute on Trade Policy, which offers training for mid-career professionals, and was the coordinator of Canadian participation in the annual Canada-UK Colloquium from 1996 until 2012. Wolfe is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) in their initiative on Canada’s future trade and investment policy agenda; and an Associate of the International Institute for Sustainable Development where he works on transparency and accountability in trade governance. He is co-author with Rod Macdonald of 'Canada’s Third National Policy: The Epiphenomenal or the Real Constitution?,' (UTLJ 2009) and 'Is Citizen Federalism Canada's Third National Policy?,' (2013). He was Program Director and Senior Section Director at Camp Kandalore, 1970-73.