Inter-disciplinary collaborations

Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas

The Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) reflects and advances McGill’s commitment to interdisciplinary study in the humanities. IPLAI is dedicated to understanding how the arts (literature, painting, film, theatre, music, industrial and artistic design, architecture) and new ideas come into being in a range of settings (schools, the law courts, markets, the Web, the book trade, state institutions), and in relation to social, cultural, and institutional practices. It also strives to understand how the “startling unexpectedness” of art and ideas is able to transform the private world of the individual, the greater world of public matters, and the relationship between the two. The focus, then, is on the dynamic life of art and ideas — their relationship to public and private life; their connection to a range of social practices; their formative passage through or continuing existence in education, business, religion, and law; their embeddedness in collective and individual action, feeling, expression, and cognition; and their contribution to remaking the world into which they are born. IPLAI brings together scholars from a range of disciplines and also provides opportunities for artists and scholars to work in collaboration on matters of shared concern. By creating an organized space for serious play among scholarly disciplines and between artists and scholars, the Institute enhances opportunities for leading-edge research. IPLAI thus builds on and advances the tradition of interdisciplinarity that is one of the university’s hallmark strengths.

IPLAI will combine its long term mission with a high level of flexibility, building a responsive dialogue around two-year research themes. Memory and Echo is the first. Download the Memory and Echo Call for Submissions [.pdf]

Improvisation, Community and Social Practice

The CRC is part of a 4 year SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative, comprising researchers from many disciplines across Canada, which explores musical improvisation as a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action. Taking as a point of departure performance practices that cannot readily be scripted, predicted, or compelled into orthodoxy, we argue that the innovative working models of improvisation developed by creative practitioners have helped to promote a dynamic exchange of cultural forms, and to encourage new, socially responsive forms of community building across national, cultural, and artistic boundaries. Improvisation, in short, has much to tell us about the ways in which communities based on such forms are politically and materially pertinent to envisioning and sounding alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. This initiative provides opportunities for students and postdoctoral fellows through its work program and summer institutes; provides information-sharing opportunities through its on-line journal, colloquia, website, and publications; and fosters innovative partnerships with several community-based organizations. The project research focuses on issues raised by seven areas related to improvisation: law and justice, pedagogy, social policy, transcultural understanding, gender and the body, text and media, and social aesthetics. As part of the team working on Improvisation, Law and Justice, the CRC will resarch initiatives on the normative structures of improvisation and its relation to originality, copyright and creative sharing. As coordinator of the Improvisation and Social Policy Team, the CRC will assess the implications of improvisational activity for social policies such as arts funding and community acceptance.

Centenary Conference on Levinas and Law

September 18-19, 2006

The CRC and the McGill University Faculty of Law held a major conference to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas - entitled the Centenary Conference on Levinas and Law. This conference brought together major figures in the study of Levinas, law, and justice, from around the world, for a two day event on September 18 and 19, 2006. For more information, go to The Centenary Conference on Levinas and Law website.

Selected papers from the conference are due to be published this year, in Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic, Palgrave Macmillan, London & New York, 2008. 400pp.

Shakespeare Moot Court Project

(with Paul Yachnin, Department of English)

Professor Manderson serves as Joint Director, with Professor Paul Yachnin, of the ongoing McGill McGill Shakespeare Moot Project, now in its fourth year. Our project is to think of Shakespeare as law, just as we think of the Civil Code or the judgments of the Supreme Court as law. By a process of dramatic invention and indirection, the project seeks to model and to explore the nature of interpretation, the development of a legal tradition, and the way in which value and meaning intersect in the creation of law and literature alike. The overall aims of the project are: (a) to provide an organic and responsive model for the ways in which resources to articulate social values can be developed; (b) to explore the ways in which traditions of legal and textual interpretation are created, grown, and modified; (c) to offer new insights into the normative implications of a body of work of supreme cultural significance; (d) to explore the particular nature of Shakespeare's drama, and of literature generally, as an expressive register of normative social values; (e) to consider how literature and literary thinking might influence and might have already influenced law and legal thinking.

In September 2004 the creators of the project gave the Annual Friends of the Library Lecture at McGill University, entitled "Love on Trial: Same Sex Marriage and the Law of Shakespeare," and inaugurated the project website.

Visiting judges for The Bard de la Mer moot in March 2005 were Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law, Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law, New York, author of Legal Discourse and "Law and the Courts of Love"; Constance Jordan, Professor of English, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California; and Richard Strier, Professor of English and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Civilizations in the College, University of Chicago. The judgments from this case have been accepted as a special edition of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities: Yachin, P. Manderson, D. et al. "Not Drowning, Waiving: Responsibility to Others in the Court of Shakespeare". judgments from this case have been accepted as a special edition of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities, Feb 2008; vol. 4: pp. 20 - 69.

In November 2005 the Court again reconvened to consider 'the question of character': the relevance of evidence of character in determining truth, in law and in Shakespeare. Visiting judges were Dr Adam Gearey, Birkbeck College, and author, with Costas Douzinas, of Critical Jurisprudence: The Political Philosophy of Justice (Hart, 2005), Lars Engle, Professor of English, Tulsa University; and our own Professor Dennis Klinck, Faculty of Law, McGill University and author of The Word of the Law (Carleton, 1992). For further information on this trial, see here.

The judgments from the March 2005 McGill Shakespeare Moot Project case, The Bard de la Mer (Du Parcq v Pedersen; Pedersen v Vidaloca) [2005] 3 C. of Sh. 1., appear as a special edition of the journal judgments from this case have been accepted as a special edition of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol 4 No. 1, edited by Desmond Manderson.

• "'As If' - The Court of Shakespeare and the Relationship of Law and Literature [.pdf]" (2008) 4 Law, Culture and the Humanities 52-68.
• "Not Drowning, Waiving: Responsibility to Others in the Court of Shakespeare [.pdf]" (with Paul Yachnin, Peter Goodrich, Constance Jordan, and Richard Strier),(2008) 4 Law, Culture and the Humanities 68-118.

In July 2007 the Shakespeare Moot Project discussed their work and experience as a special panel discussion at Shakespeare and the Law, Warwick University. For further information, click here.

Café La[w]tte

January - May, 2005

(with Sarah Turner, Department of Geography)

A collaborative project in law and social geography with Dr Sarah Turner of the Department of Geography at McGill explores implicit normativity, socialization, and the production of legal knowledge, from an inter-disciplinary framework drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre, and Judith Lefebvre. In order to examine the ways ideology and form come to influence a social space, this project took as its focus ‘Coffee House’ , a weekly social event for law students at McGill regularly sponsored by law firms. The project examines the interactions between law students, professors and lawyers in a social space caught between the academic and professional worlds.

See Desmond Manderson and Sarah Turner, "Coffee House: Habitus and Performance Among Law Students" [.pdf] (2006) 31(3) Law and Social Inquiry 649-676.

Legal Spaces

Legal Spaces is a Special Issue of the transcontinental and interdisciplinary journal Law Text Culture, bringing together contemporary work on the semiotics of law and space, under the editorship of Professor Manderson. Many of the contributions are drawn from papers presented at the International Conference for the Semiotics of Law held at McGill in April 2005.