Many professors of the Faculty took to the press over the summer months, sharing their expertise on matters of pressing importance ranging from innovation and USMCA (the “new NAFTA”), to systemic discrimination, consumer privacy, equal marriage, and child refugee rights.
To get the benefits of innovation, Canada needs a national effort
E. Richard Gold, The Hill Times, 1 October 2018
“Canadian efforts to extract social and economic benefit from innovation have not only been late but tepid. For too long, pundits and policy-makers considered innovation manna that falls from heaven without any strategy or government involvement. We have focused on attracting jobs and getting access to foreign technology rather than on building a Canadian innovation ecosystem where firms bring back the financial gains from worldwide sales, groom the next generation of investors and innovators, and address pressing social needs. No other country that has succeeded at innovation has followed Canada’s path.”
A chance at justice for the Rohingya?
Payam Akhavan, Opencanada.org, 26 September 2018
“Just two years ago, in 2016, Kutupalong was a wildlife refuge where endangered animals roamed freely in pristine forests. Now, it is the largest refugee camp in the world, an ocean of misery comprising some 700,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State to face an uncertain future in neighbouring Bangladesh. The mere existence of this city of sorrow is mute testimony to what the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has described as a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing.’
As I walked through the camp in June, reflecting on the cruel irony of the boy’s fate, there were countless other children just like him, wandering in the dirt roads amidst the makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin shelters on the deforested hills they now called home.” Keep reading…
Comprendre la discrimination systémique
Colleen Sheppard et Kara Sheppard-Jones, Le Devoir, 13 septembre 2018
« À la suite du dépôt d’une pétition citoyenne du groupe Montréal en action, la Ville de Montréal a annoncé le 17 août dernier qu’elle tiendra une consultation publique sur le racisme et la discrimination systémiques, une première du genre au Québec. D’un jour à l’autre, plus de détails sur cette consultation devraient être annoncés par la Ville. Dans ce contexte, nous trouvons impératif de bien comprendre ce que signifie une discrimination ou un racisme systémiques. »
Continuer la lecture….
Consumer Privacy in a Behavioral World
Ignacio Cofone (McGill) and Adriana Robertson (UofT), Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 69, 2018
Readers interested in Privacy Law and in the work of our new faculty member, Professor Ignacio Cofone, may find this scholarly paper of interest.
“In 2017, Congress repealed the FCC’s latest attempt to protect consumer privacy on the internet and allowed ISPs to continue to track their users’ online behavior. We evaluate the impact of this decision on consumer privacy in light of biased beliefs and information overload. We do so through a well-documented behavioral bias: Non-belief in the Law of Large Numbers. We provide a framework for deciding why and how to protect consumer privacy. We then suggest private law and regulatory solutions to do so in a more effective way than either the current or the now-repealed regime.”
Read the article on SSRN.
Véronique Bélanger, BCL’91, LLB’91, LLM’99, est envoyée au bureau de la Principale
Journal du Barreau, vol.50, no. 7, septembre 2018
Dans la section Parmi Nous, p. 9, on pourra lire que Me Véronique Bélanger, qui était doyenne adjointe à la planification stratégique à la Faculté de droit, a été promue chef de cabinet pour la professeure Suzanne Fortier, principale et vice-chancellière de l’Université McGill.
Feuilleter le Journal du Barreau
Decolonizing Labour Law: Contributions to an Emergent Transnational Labour Law
Adelle Blackett, Canadian Journal of Law & Society, 5 September 2018
Professor Adelle Blackett has edited a special edition of the Canadian Journal of Law & Society on labour law, with articles contributed by current and former members of the Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory, including several of our alumni.
Find out more…
Former UN human rights chief calls Canada’s handling of child refugees ‘inhumane’
Brian Hill, Global News, 3 September 2018
“Canada should change the way it treats child refugees and their families. That’s the conclusion of a former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, who says Canada’s policy blocking child refugees from reuniting with their parents is both ‘inhumane and degrading.’
‘Being deprived of your parents by the law for no other reason than an immigration violation, which is not a criminal offence, is akin to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,’ said François Crépeau, a law professor and director of McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.”
Keep reading…
Ronald Niezen appointed 2018-2019 William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at Harvard
On July 24, 2018, the Faculty was pleased to congratulate Professor Ronald Niezen on his appointment as 2018-2019 William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair of Canadian Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. During his one-year leave from McGill, Professor Niezen will continue his research on the popular communication of human rights claims, while teaching courses in the Department of Anthropology on The Anthropology of Law and on Indigeneity, Rights, and Identity. Read the full announcement.
Il faut que les Européens acceptent qu’ils sont un continent d’immigration
RTBF La Première (Belgique), 12 juin 2018
L’affaire de l’Aquarius, ce bateau qui navigue en Méditerranée avec plusieurs centaines de migrants à son bord, montre « qu’aucun politicien européen n’arrive à faire démarrer une politique migratoire: il n’y a aucune solidarité, aucune coopération. L’Europe n’arrive pas à se doter d’une politique des réfugiés » explique au micro de La Première François Crépeau, professeur de droit international public à l’université McGill à Montréal et ancien rapporteur spécial des Nations Unies pour les droits de l’Homme des migrants de 2011 à 2017.
Voir l’entrevue.
Fifteen years after equal marriage – many successes, but much more work to be done
Robert Leckey, The Globe and Mail, 12 June 2018
“After 14 years, we have chipped a few of the dishes we received as wedding presents. From one angle, our marriage isn’t long. From another, it spans most of the time since the Ontario Court of Appeal made history, on June 10, 2003, by allowing this country’s first same-sex marriages. Like other anniversaries, this one prompts celebration of the past and reflection on future challenges and work. What has equal marriage changed in Canada?…”
Keep reading…