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To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first graduating class of the McGill Program, the Faculty of Law and the newly renamed Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law will host an international conference on the future of the discipline of law. The working languages of the conference will be English and French.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: April 16, 2012

This event will aim to foster a debate that critically assesses the latest developments in legal thought and innovative approaches to law, in the light of the challenge of globalization and the move away from a national paradigm for understanding law. It will also ask the question of how to integrate the insights so gained into the teaching of law. The concern is with law in all its dimensions: public and private, local and transnational, formal and informal.

By being forced to abandon, at least in part, the posited law of the nation state as their lodestar, legal education and legal scholarship have been presented with an opportunity to break the mould of centuries of legal nationalism: an opportunity that encourages new, transdisciplinary and transnational ways of thinking about law. In short, the goal is to re-assess and to re-imagine the discipline of law, its place in the university, and its role in society.

Some of the themes which we expect to be covered include: How do globalization and legal pluralism affect our understanding of law, legal education or both? In its interaction with other disciplines, how does law preserve its disciplinary identity? Can a renewed understanding of particular fields of law shed light on our evolving understanding of the discipline? How is the teaching and research of basic private law — contracts, civil wrongs, property, the law of persons — affected by the increasingly transnational and transdisciplinary focus of legal scholarship?

For more information, please download our complete Call for proposals [.pdf].

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