Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Hoi Kong
The Institute of Comparative Law invites you to “Coffee and Comparative Law with... Professor Hoi Kong. ” Professor Kong is one of McGill’s own comparative scholars who teaches and writes in the areas of Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and Municipal Law, among others.
“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.
While this event is geared towards graduate students, undergrads are also welcome!
For us to explore and discuss, Professor Kong has distributed a draft of his current work-in-progress entitled “Deliberative Constitutional Amendments”. He writes: “This paper has two goals. First, it will examine amendment processes in two jurisdictions—Switzerland and Canada--in order to assess whether they should be characterized as deliberative or aggregative in nature. Second, it will argue that to the extent that amendment processes should be understood to be deliberative in nature, there are a range of plausible institutional mechanisms for rendering constitutional amendment processes optimally deliberative. The specific choices made in a given constitutional order will be driven by features of that context and will reflect different strands of deliberative democratic theory. But before I engage these substantive debates, I will offer a preliminary reflection (1) on what is meant by a constitutional amendment, and (2) about the normative significance of acts of constitutional characterization.”
Coffee and snacks will be provided. If possible, please RSVP at jeffrey.kennedy [at] mail.mcgill.ca, as well as if you have yet to receive the draft article.
