Nouvelles étudiantes

Lancement médiatisé du sixième volume de la revue Contours; dernière chance de soutenir la campagne de financement de Ju(ri)stes en santé; le juge Nicholas Kasirer accueille l'Association des étudiants noirs en droit de McGill; et nouvelles publications par les étudiants et étudiantes de la Faculté. Lire la suite...
10 April 2018

Le juge Kasirer accueille l’Association des étudiants noirs en droit de McGill

Justice Nicholas Kasirer with the BLSA student group.

Le 16 mars, le juge de la Cour d’appel du Québec Nicholas Kasirer, BCL’85, LLB’85, a accueilli les étudiants et étudiantes de l’Association des étudiants noirs en droit de McGill. En plus d’assister à l’audience du jour, le groupe a pu profiter d’une visite des coulisses de la Cour ainsi que d’une discussion avec l’ancien doyen de la Faculté.

One week to go to Healthy Legal Minds’ crowdfunding campaign

The Healthy Legal Minds team
The Seeds of Change crowdfunding campaign of student-led initiative Healthy Legal Minds is entering its last week! They are only 7% away from reaching their objective. Please support them in making law studies and the law profession healthier!

Live Performance and Thought-provoking Discussions at Contours’ Sixth Volume Launch

The Contours editorial team with Dean Robert Leckey in the atrium during the launch of the 6th edition.

On March 15, Contours: Voices of Women in Law Journal launched its sixth volume. Founded in 2012, the journal creates a critical space for women in law. This year’s issue showcased raw and intimate takes on topics such as the legal recruitment process, abortion, animal law, and sexual assault. The successful launch was covered by local media. CBC Montreal interviewed Senior VP-Organization Romita Sur about the history of Contours and its aim to raise awareness about issues women face in the legal world. In addition, Bull and Bear spoke with Managing Editor Rebecca Kaeser Reiss about how emotional intelligence is fundamental to being a lawyer.

For the first time, this year’s issue also featured a submission from another law faculty, authored by Western University student Ava Williams. Williams was the face of the Globe and Mail’s Unfounded series, a feature about sexual assault complaints dismissed by the police as baseless. At the launch, she performed a reading of her letter to the London police detective who mishandled her sexual assault complaint. The event was followed by a Q and A, and stimulating discussion about the criminal justice system and police accountability.

The subject matter of the submissions in this year’s volume demonstrates that we are at a turning point in law and for what it means to be a lawyer today. The issue also showcased several pieces from the Legal Writing and Self student-initiated seminar, and was distributed at the Southeast Region Legal Writing conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Volume VI of Contours is now available online.

Text by Romita Sur, Senior VP Organization of Contours

Student News and Research

  • DCL candidate Brian Bird published “The Unbroken Supremacy of the Canadian Constitution”, giving insight into the pre-1982 legal basis for constitutional judicial review & the express supremacy clause in s. 52 (1) of the Constitution Act, 1982
  • DCL candidate Jeffrey Kennedy published the paper “The Citizen Victim: Reconciling the Public and Private in Criminal Sentencing” in Criminal Law and Philosophy
  • BCL/LLB candidate Madeleine MacDonald presented a paper entitled “Avenues of Reconciliation and New Constitutionalism: Indigenous Language Rights in Canada’s Federal System” at the colloquium on Indigenous Peoples, Canada, and the United States: Sovereignty, Sustainability, and Reconciliation. The event was presented by Fulbright Canada, the Center for the Study of Canada at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, and the College of Social Sciences at the University of Hawai’i.
  • LLM student Florence Ashley authored “Why ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’ is bad science” in The Conversation Canada, criticizing a theory that suggests that youngsters are being misled into claiming a trans identity before they truly understand what that means. Florence Ashley a aussi fait l’objet d’un portrait par Droit-Inc : Juriste trans recherche justice.
  • The “Flo Collective”, an initiative founded by law students Breanne Lavalée-Heckert, Anisha Samat, Nathalie Laflamme, Sarah-Grace Ross and Elizabeth Lougheed, was featured in Nunatsiaq News. Members of the collective say they want to end the inequity faced by women and girls in northern Canada, where tampons can cost $1 each and are not covered by freight subsidies under the Nutrition North program.