Tina Piper – Research Director, McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy
Professor Piper researches the rules that govern creativity and innovation in the sciences and arts, and how the law can regulate those creative activities in individual and collective best interests. Creative collaborations often do not respect boundaries, particularly when conducted online. Thus often creators are subject to conflicting legal regimes or transnational regulatory systems that require comparative and transnational study. Further, creative activities often happen outside the law either because they have traditionally been regarded as non-economic (for e.g. craft workers) or because their intellectual property practices are better served by unwritten regulation within the group (e.g. physicians). Researching these unwritten norms often requires fieldwork and empirical study of plural legal orders, drawing insights from other disciplines like economics, sociology and anthropology.
René Provost – Director, McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism
Professor Provost’s research centres on the notion of boundaries among regimes, whether these be normative delimitations among several spheres of law, structural interactions among varied elements of legal discourse, or interaction and cross-pollination among disciplinary outlooks on a given issue. This has taken the form of a book-length work on the relationship between international human rights and international humanitarian law, and of articles on tensions between domestic and international law in the Canadian context, the influence of cultural diversity on the unity and universality of human rights and humanitarian law, and the combination of legal and anthropological outlooks on arguments of cultural exception before international tribunals. The idea of the boundary is informed by legal pluralism and its suggestion that exchanges and overlap among legal regime offer rich sites of insights into the nature of legal discourse.
Lionel Smith – Director, Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law
Professor Lionel Smith’s research is in private law in a transsystemic perspective, with a particular focus on the law governing unjust enrichment, gifts, loyalty and trusts. All of these areas represent non-market interactions between citizens and each of them raises questions about gratuitous intervention and the appropriate legal responses to it. These legal responses reveal a number of common themes, across common law and civil law. For example, the law relating to loyalty reveals that, contrary to the expectations of market-economy analysis, legal systems often impose the most exacting obligations, not on those who charge the highest fee, but on those who act gratuitously.