Meet some of our students: Hisham Ababneh | Crystal Ashby | Futsum Tesfatsion Abbay | Dorota Bogajewska | Daniel Clarry | Marie-Ève Couture Ménard | Isabelle Deschamps | Maureen Duffy | Sibylle Ferreira | Alexandra Harrington | Hasna Haj Najafi | Edin Hodžić | Charles Paul Hoffman | Sabaa Khan | Maxime Jacquin | Diane Le Gall | Brock Rutter | Mónica Sumoy | Qianwen Zhang | Ruiqiao Zhang
Please note that this list is not exhaustive. If you are one of our ICL students and wish to have your bio added, please lysanne [dot] larose [at] mcgill [dot] ca (email the webmaster).
Hisham Ababneh
Hisham Ababneh is a Jordanian student, with an LL.B. from the University of Jordan, 2011. He is currently doing his Master degree in Comparative Law at the Institute of Comparative Law (ICL), with a focus on International Business Law. He is broadly interested in corporate law, securities regulation, competition law, and law and economics.
While he was a law student, Hisham worked as a paralegal in Jordania law firms for almost two years.
Hisham explains choosing McGill for his post graduate studies because of its well-known reputation around the world and its transsystemic approach to legal studies. He aims to pursue a career as a specialised corporate lawyer.
Crystal Ashby
After completing a diploma in social sciences in cegep, Crystal studied law at Université de Montreal(UdeM), where she received her LL.B. in 2009.
While at UdeM, Crystal volunteered for Refugee Action Montreal, a non-governmental organization that provides legal information and support to refugees.
Over the past two years, she has worked as a law clerk to the Court of Appeal of Quebec to Mr. Justice Allan Hilton. Crystal is a member of the Quebec Bar. She is currently a LL.M. in the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill.
Futsum Tesfatsion Abbay
Futsum Tesfatsion Abbay is a distinguished legal scholar from Eritrea. He obtained his LL.B. (with distinction) from the University of Asmara in 1998, following which he was appointed as a graduate assistant in the law program of the university.
He received a USAID scholarship in 1999 that allowed him to pursue a LL.M degree at McGill. After obtaining his LL.M. in 2002, Futsum taught at the Faculty of Law of the University of Asmara. An O'Brien Fellow, he is currently a doctoral student at the Law Faculty of McGill.
Futsum is interested in the areas of disability rights, human rights in general, comparative law and land law issues. Presently he is doing research on the rights of persons with disabilities in Africa. He will examine the regional and international legal developments on disability law. By taking Eritrea as a case study, he will study how the regional and international disability laws would impact the Eritrean legal framework relating to disability.
Dorota Bogajewska
Dorota Bogajewska is a LLM student in McGill's Institute of Comparative Law, where she has been awarded a Chief Justice Greenshields Memorial Scholarship and a Graduate Excellence Fellowship. Dorota holds a Master’s degree in Law from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, where she graduated with distinction (2011).
Throughout her studies, Dorota has been particularly interested in international law. At first, she focused on human rights, which led her to participate in the LLP-ERASMUS student exchange program at the University of Joensuu, Finland. Later, she pursued an interest in comparative law and dedicated her Polish master’s thesis to comparing solutions adopted in the area of revocation of a will by marriage and dissolution of marriage in Canadian Common and Civil Law provinces.
Through a series of internships, Dorota has observed Canadian law students, lawyers and judges who provided her with outstanding insights on a lawyer's approach to Common Law in search of justice. Inspired by that experience, she has decided to research answers to real life problems occurring in the area of Wills and Estates (Succession Law).
Daniel Clarry
Daniel is a graduate of the University of Queensland, Australia, where he graduated with Bachelors in Commerce and Law (with Honours). Daniel is an LLM thesis student in McGill’s Institute of Comparative Law and is particularly interested in the comparative study of private law. His LLM thesis, titled "The Irreducible Core of the Trust", looks at the essential juridical nature of the trust in a comparative perspective and was supervised by Professor Lionel Smith. Daniel's thesis attempts to expose the legal relations that must exist in all express private trusts in order to legitimately attract the title 'trust' to a particular legal arrangement and, as such, his thesis also reveals what legal relations may overbear subjective expression in the creation of those trusts in the broader common law tradition.
Earlier this year, Daniel was awarded the Institute of Comparative Law Essay Prize for his paper titled "Apples, Oranges and Trusts: a comparative study of 'ownership' in the trust paradigm", which he wrote for the Institute's graduate-level course, Legal Traditions. By fixating on the situs of ownership in different civil law trusts, Daniel's paper considered how the introduction of ‘trusts’ throughout the civil law tradition has affected civilian notions of ownership and property and also sought to expose how legal doctrine has a tendency to become garbled during the process of translation and transplantation.
Daniel's research at McGill has been, and continues to be, generously supported by the Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law and the Ministère du Développement économique, de l'Innovation et de l'Exportation (MDEIE) in the form of the MDEIE Scholarship in Civil Law Trusts, which has enabled Daniel to pursue a publication and research agenda in the current Fall term at McGill. Before reading for the LLM at McGill, Daniel worked as a Litigation Lawyer in the General Counsel's Office of the Office of Fair Trading in London, UK, and before that as a Lawyer in Trade Practices and Competition at the Australian Government Solicitor's Offices in Brisbane, Australia, where he worked mostly in the fields of competition and consumer law for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Marie-Ève Couture Ménard
Marie-Ève graduated from the Université de Montréal with a L.L.B. and with a L.L.M. in the Droit, biotechnologies et société program. She is now pursuing her graduate studies at McGill University in the D.C.L. program, under the supervision of Professor Lara Khoury, at the Institute of Comparative Law (ICL). Her graduate project focuses on the public health governance in the era of chronic diseases. The aim is to examine the different tools of governance available to the occidental countries to overcome this «invisible plague» of the XXIst century, in order to develop an innovative normative framework. The public health issue of chronic diseases is far from being unique to Canada. It is of planetary interest and she intends to adopt a comparative approach in her work. Being part of the ICL will enable Marie-Ève to blossom within a group of teachers and researchers with a rich experience in this field and who strongly encourage the exploration of comparative research.
Marie-Ève also blogs on McGill Grad Life.
Isabelle Deschamps
Isabelle Deschamps is pursuing a D.C.L. under the supervision of Professor Roderick A. Macdonald. She investigates the interactions between commercial law reform, informal business and culture in West and Central Africa, with a particular focus on women entrepreneurs. She is also exploring the implications of social scientific and critical legal pluralist theories for understanding law-making and development in West and Central Africa.
Prior to commencing graduate studies at McGill, Isabelle worked in the commercial litigation department of an international law firm in Montreal and in London (UK). She qualified with the Quebec Bar in 2005 and was admitted at the Law Society of England and Wales in 2008 (currently non-practising solicitor).
In the summer of 2009, she volunteered and taught French in rural Benin as well as travelled through Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal. Following this experience, Isabelle decided to pursue her enduring interests in academics and international cooperation by enrolling at McGill. She returned to Benin in 2010 to conduct research (including at the Organization for Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa’s (OHADA) École Régionale Supérieure de la Magistrature in Porto Novo) in preparation for her graduate studies. At the same time, she volunteered for a local NGO providing health and education assistance to poor communities.
Isabelle completed her LL.B. at Université de Montréal in 2002 and a Master in International Relations at Instituto Ortega y Gasset (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) in 2004. Her thesis examined the legitimacy of political institutions in Canada and the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Isabelle currently sits on the board of directors of Danse Danse, a non-for-profit international dance broadcasting organization. She is co-founder and a director of Health and Education Now!, a Canadian non-for-profit organisation working on community development projects in Benin. In the past, she presided the board of international cooperation organization La Société Mer et Monde and was the corporate secretary of Diagramme Gestion Culturelle, which offers management services to dance companies.
Maureen T. Duffy
Maureen T. Duffy is originally from the United States, where she obtained her Juris Doctor degree, cum laude, from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, after completing a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a member of the Bars of the State of Illinois and the Northern District of Illinois. She practiced law in Chicago for several years, first in private practice, then as a specialist in the area of children’s rights. She subsequently pursued an interest in international human rights law by obtaining an LL.M. degree, with Dean’s Honours, at McGill’s Institute of Comparative Law, havng chosen McGill based on its outstanding program, faculty and research resources. Maureen is presently pursuing a doctoral degree in international law under the supervision of Professor René Provost. Her thesis explores shifting presumptions relating to criminal detentions, specifically focusing on these shifts in the context of terrorism detentions.
Sibylle Ferreira
Sibylle Ferreira is a Swiss student who obtained her licence in law from the University of Geneva in 2006.
After her two years of mandatory training in a renowned law firm in Geneva, she was admitted to the Geneva’s Bar in November 2008. Sibylle pursued her career as an associate lawyer in the same law firm from January 2009 to July 2011. Her main practice areas were family law, divorce (national and international), premarital agreements and marriage contracts, international children abduction, inheritance and private international law. During that period, she had the chance to attend conferences organized by the International Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in the US and in Europe.
Sibylle is currently pursuing a LLM at the McGill Institute of Comparative Law with a focus on medical law.
Alexandra Harrington
Alexandra R. Harrington graduated cum laude from New York University with a BA in Politics and a BA in History. She received her J.D. from Albany Law School of Union University and was admitted to the New York State Bar in 2006. During her studies at Albany Law School, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Albany Law Journal of Science & Technology. In 2007 she graduated summa cum laude from Albany Law School with a LL.M. in International Law.
Currently a D.C.L. student with the Institute, Ms. Harrington was awarded a Provost’s Graduate Fellowship and a MacDonald Graduate Scholarship from McGill University. She was drawn to study at the Institute of Comparative Law because of the strength of its faculty and the opportunities for in-depth research it affords.
Ms. Harrington’s doctoral thesis, conducted under the supervision of Professor Frédéric Mégret, will examine the transformation of territory in international law. She has published over fifteen law review articles on a variety of topics including military law, criminal law, corruption law, international trade law, food law, constitutional law, privacy law, international and comparative law, religious law, aviation law, international organizations, international and regional environmental law, health law and international policing.
Hasna Haj Najafi
Hasna Haj Najafi is originally from Iran. In 2003, she came in the 3rd overall out of over than 450,000 candidates to the national university entrance examination in the field of social sciences. She received her LL.B. with distinction from the University of Tehran, Faculty of Law and Political Science (2003-2007), after which she was admitted to the University of Tehran's LL.M. program in "Private and Islamic Law" (2007-2010). In her thesis, Hasna explored different approaches to Reorganization before Liquidation in a comparative way in order to criticize the newly edited bill of Commercial Act in Iran and to suggest appropriate amendments.
Hasna then decided to deepen her knowledge of law by pursuing further graduate studies abroad. She chose McGill's Faculty of Law because of its excellent emphasis on diverse legal traditions, legal cultures and legal systems and she is currently undertaking her LL.M within the Institute of Comparative Law, which she feels was the best choice for her
Hasna is broadly interested in Comparative Law Studies, especially in the interconnection between common Law and civil law traditions, harmonization of different legal systems and also Islamic Law matters (including codification in Islamic countries, etc). She is also interested in legal theory and legal history.
She is also a member of the National Elites Association and the Young Scholars Club in Iran.
Edin Hodžić
Edin Hodžić graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Sarajevo and obtained his Master's Degree in international human rights law (with Distinction) from the University of Oxford, for which he was supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Open Society Institute joint scholarship scheme.
From 2002 to 2005, Edin worked as a project coordinator at Media Center Sarajevo, following which he took up a post of an analyst at the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he worked until mid-2007. He was engaged as a consultant on a number of occasions and participated in several research projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since May 2006 he has been engaged as the Human Rights Editor for Open Society Fund Bosnia and Herzegovina’s The Pulse of Democracy, a bi-monthly online publication aimed at featuring critical analysis of the current policy issues in BaH.
Edin came to Montreal in September 2007 as an O’Brien Fellow to work on his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Mark Antaki. His doctoral thesis is devoted to a human rights analysis of the possible approaches to constitutional engineering in, and legal recognition of ethno-cultural groups within, societies characterized by deep cleavages along ethno-cultural lines. His research interests are mostly related to constitutionalism and international human rights law, respectively, with a particular focus on theory and practice of collective and minority rights, international criminal law and transitional justice in general.
Charles Paul Hoffman
Charles Paul Hoffman is currently pursuing a D.C.L. through the Institute of Comparative Law. His doctoral thesis, conducted under the supervision of Professor Mark Antaki, is a history of the Anti-Combines Act of 1889, Canada's first competition statute, enacted a year prior to the United States' more famous Sherman Act. His research interests include legal history (especially the influence of legal and political culture on the development of the laws of Canada and the United States), comparative constitutional law, sexual orientation and the law, legal theory, and competition law.
He holds a J.D. from the University of Illinois (2005; magna cum laude, Order of the Coif) and an A.B. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago (2001). He anticipates receiving an LL.M. from the Institute of Comparative Law in February 2012 for his thesis on the abolition of the Legislative Council of Nova Scotia, conducted under the supervision of Professor Tina Piper.
He is admitted to the Bar in the State of New York and practiced in the areas of competition law and litigation in New York City from 2005 to 2010.
Maxime Jacquin
Maxime Jacquin graduated in 2008 with an LL.B. from Sherbrooke University, Canada. He is currently in the process of completing his Masters in Comparative Law at the ICL, with a focus on International Business Law. He is broadly interested in corporate law, securities regulation, competition law, and law and economics.
His supervised research project addresses the question of whether Canadian securities regulators should adopt a principles-based approach to capital markets regulation in light of a growing interest across the world for flexible and streamlined regulation. The paper compares the regulatory approaches of four countries and examines the impacts a shift to principles-based regulation would have on the competitiveness and cost of capital of Canada’s capital markets. For him, McGill came as a natural choice for pursuing comparative legal studies as the host of some of the world’s most qualified scholars in comparative law and because it offers a unique transsystemic perspective to its students.
Sabaa Khan
Sabaa Khan is an O'Brien Fellow in Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at the Faculty of Law, and a DCL candidate within the Institute of Comparative Law. She holds an LL.M. in International Law from the Université de Montréal (2010, Liste d'excellence) and a Licentiate in Civil Law from the University of Ottawa (2000). She is a Member of the Barreau du Québec and has clerked at the International Labour Office, Freedom of Association Branch (Geneva).
Khan's current research explores interactions between international trade, labour and environmental regimes on the issues of electronic waste and urban ore mining. She has lectured at the 2010 CÉRIUM European and International Environmental Law Seminar (Montréal) and spoken at the 2011 World Resources Forum (Davos), on behalf of the StEP E-waste Summer School initiative of the United Nations University, Institute for Sustainability and Peace.
Her work on human rights and migrant caregivers has been published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society and her comparative research on the waste dimension of pervasive computing has been featured in the Lex Electronica. Khan is also a pianist and published composer, the author and illustrator of two children's books, and she holds a 1st dan black belt certified by the Japanese Karate Federation.
Diane Le Gall
Having dual French and Canadian citizenship, Diane Le Gall has been studying law in France for four years. During her first two years, in Rennes 1 University (Bretagne), she followed a general curriculum, and got acquainted with the main areas of law.
She then entered a selective program at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Magistère de Droit des Activités Economiques) in private and public business law, and there obtained a Licence (3 years of law) and Maîtrise (1st year of masters). Though focused on economic activities, this degree enabled her to deal with really diverse matters, ranging from labour law to international criminal law, from corporate law to humanitarian law. In this context, she did an internship at the French Ministry of Justice (2009), in the criminal law division, focusing on environmental law, labour law and public health law. In 2010, she did an internship in a French civil and criminal court (first level of jurisdiction).
Her main area of interest being international law and human rights, she is currently a LL.M-non thesis candidate at McGill Institute of Comparative Law. She is institutionally involved in the Faculty as Vice-president of the Graduate Law Students Association.
Brock Rutter
I am a lawyer licensed in the states of Vermont and New York. Since graduating from Vermont Law School in 2008 I have worked for the Vermont judiciary programming a software to assist litigants who come to court without attorneys, as a research associate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and as a lecturer at Vermont Law School. I am currently working on my LL.M. thesis focusing on legal factors influencing the development of the internet and cross-jurisdictional cloud computing services.
My research at McGill focuses on the important changes that are occurring as cloud computing becomes the norm. Whereas the internet linked up the world in the late 20th century, cloud computing means that users in one location will frequently be using computing power or storage in another location, or even multiple locations across the globe. You may use cloud computing services everyday; common consumer application include Facebook and all of Google's services. Technologists say location of servers and other equipment should be irrelevant. They'd like to see computing infrastructure such as giant data centres placed in the most efficient locations based on criteria such as cost of power, speed of connection, or distance to major markets.
However, as different countries have taken different approaches to free speech, personal privacy, intellectual property, and other issues, making location legally irrelevant has so proved elusive. Many would like to see more common worldwide approaches to internet jurisdiction, privacy, and other related issues. Notably, European countries are are often skeptical of law American attitudes toward privacy regulation and discovery in civil and criminal matters, including national security. Americans - including many service providers - sometimes complain of European privacy and consumer protection regulation.
I have been focusing on what values are promoted or suppressed by different regulatory schemes. Tentatively, I suggest that a uniform approach to most of the issues raised by cloud computing is a long way off. However, enabling different countries to make different value judgments is probably a good thing. I think the best solutions may involve making locations irrelevant for infrastructure but not for end users. Technology might now or soon be able to provide some solutions that will maximize efficiency without imposing uniform solutions to values-based questions.
Mónica Sumoy
Mónica Sumoy graduated from the Autonomous University of Barcelona with a LL.B. She practiced human rights, environmental law and property rights law and soon realised that she wanted to become a legal translator and thus a comparatist. She was granted a fellowship to translate a Ph.D. thesis on Italian Law and subsequently completed an internship at the Translation Services of the EU Council in Brussels, in the wake of which she earned a degree in Translation, also at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She participated in its exchange program and attended the University of Kent (Great Britain). Upon graduation, she was awarded the most distinguished student prize.
Subsequently, she has been active in legal translation, and has also been an instructor in that subject at the aforesaid University, and decided to pursue further graduate studies in order to become a full-time professor. A Graduate Fellowship from the Spanish Association of Canadian Studies has enabled her to commence research in law, legal translation and jurilinguistics in Canada. Last year, Mónica was granted an excellence scholarship by the International Council for Canadian Studies and La Caixa to pursue her Master’s degree at McGill’s Institute of Comparative Law.
Her LL.M. thesis will be devoted to film copyright; she will study the relevant legal sources from a linguistic point of view, and intends to examine possible modes of protection of Aboriginal Law, Heritage and Culture.
Mónica is a member of various research groups and has published several translations and articles pertaining to linguistics, literature and translation.
Qianwen Zhang
Qianwen Zhang obtained her LL.B (2009) and B.A (Economics, 2009) degrees from School of Law, Xiamen University, China. In 2009, she was awarded "Graduate with Honour" (awarded to top 3% gradutes) and was granted direct admission with full scholarship to LL.M in Xiamen University.
During her studies at Xiamen University, Qianwen had the opportunity to participate in the 49th and 51st Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competitions and 7th Red Cross International Humanitarian Law Moot Court Competition. For 2008 Jessup, her team advanced to top 32 finalists in Washington D.C. For 2008 IHL, her team advanced to second place in national round and she was honored as "Best Advocate." Consequently, her team was sent as one of China's delegations to Asian-Pacific round, and awarded "top five defendant" in Hong Kong.
In 2009, Qianwen was employed by Thomson Reuters Legal as the only student representative in Xiamen University. Conducting extensive legal research for Jessup and IHL moots cultivated Qianwen's fascination for international law, especially international humanitarian law and international trade law.
Besides law, Qianwen is also active in other fields, such as arts. She has studied Chinese calligraphy for more than ten years and her works have received various awards and were even once on exhibition in Japan.
Qianwen looks forward to discussions with herfellow ICL students and also would like to do more comparative study about investment law issues between North American countries and China.
Ruiqiao Zhang
Ruiqiao Zhang obtained her Bachelor's Degree in Jilin University in China, and Master's Degrees in both Jilin University and Amsterdam Free University in the Netherlands, where she majored in civil and commercial law, as well as international commercial and trade law respectively.
Given that her double Master'ss degrees provides a solid foundation in legal studies in different legal systems, she found a particular interest in exploring the field of comparative law, with a specific focus on commercial and trade law. She is now doing the LL.M.-thesis program within the Institute of Comparative Law.
Ruiqiao explains that she chose McGill because of its special tradition of transsystemic law. Professors here are experts in both civil and common law traditions, with many of them emphasizing a comparative approach, most readily demonstrated by the number of international law specialists.