McGill University is situated in Montreal, Québec: a bilingual city in a bilingual and bijural province. The private law of Quebec, which is drawn from the civil law tradition, interacts with a system of public law that traces its origins to the English common law tradition. Because of this, McGill’s Faculty of Law has naturally been teaching law in a comparative, bijural way for the past four decades. In a world of borderless human interaction, however, a localized legal education is insufficient. McGill's unique transsystemic model of legal education ensures that students graduate with a cosmopolitan understanding of the law, one that is not confined to specific jurisdictions, or even legal traditions.

In 1999, McGill University's Faculty of Law implemented the transsystemic approach to legal education. The McGill Program enables students, who graduate with both civil law and common law degrees, to study the world’s great legal traditions in an integrated fashion. McGill’s transsystemic approach is bilingual and dialogic. It recognizes legal pluralism as a pervasive phenomenon in the modern world.

The QRCPCL’s tradition of research in comparative private law and jurilinguistics have driven its scholars to raise and explore many questions relating to transsystemic legal education, and, more fundamentally, transsystemic legal thought.

Publications of the Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law
Lysanne Larose

This website offers an insight into McGill’s unique practice of legal education. The “History” page presents the historical evolution of the law program at Mcgill. On other pages, transsystemic legal thinking is exemplified by four different types of material: scholarly writings, course materials, multimedia and student testimonials..