Founded in 1965, the Institute of Comparative Law (ICL) is one of two main vehicles for the pursuit of graduate studies at McGill’s Faculty of Law outside of the Faculty itself. Since its establishment, the ICL has been dedicated to the promotion of research in private, commercial, international and public law, studied and appreciated from the perspective of diverse legal traditions and systems. The ICL is thus defined by its openness to international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary approaches in the study of contemporary legal issues.
While the ICL’s focus has consistently been on graduate studies in law, this Institute also played a pivotal role in shaping and developing McGill’s National Programme. This Programme, the precursor to McGill’s current transsystemic approach to legal education, was established in 1968 under the leadership of Dean Maxwell Cohen, to allow undergraduate law students at McGill to pursue degrees in both the civil law and common law. Developments within the ICL between 1965 and 1968 laid some of the foundations for the bijuridical ambitions of the National Programme. That is, graduate courses on the common law and comparative law established in the ICL during this interval proved to be central to the Faculty’s undergraduate curriculum developments.
"[E]ver since the emergence of the common law programme in the mid-1960s, it was the Institute of Comparative Law (formerly the Institute of Foreign and Comparative Law) which was held out as the vehicle by which the international vocation and theoretical vision of the National Programme was primarily to be articulated at the graduate level."
- Prof. Roderick A. Macdonald, "The National Law Programme at McGill: Origins, Establishment, Prospects" (1990) 13 Dalhousie Law Journal 211.
Apart from its pedagogical undertakings, the ICL has been the site of a breadth of scholarly projects undertaken in partnership with other juridical organizations. For example, the ICL has historically maintained connections with international bodies committed to issues of arbitration and private international law. The ICL has also been solicited by agencies, notably the Canadian International Development Agency, to pursue commissioned law reform projects in countries with evolving legal systems. In approximately the last decade, work on law reform in Vietnam, China and Russia has been completed under the ICL’s aegis.