Panthéon-Assas University honours McGill professor Paul-André Crépeau
Paul-André Crépeau is the father of Quebec's contemporary Civil Code and co-author of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms
November 15, 2001
This Saturday, November 17, at 3:00 pm, in the auditorium of Panthéon-Assas University in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, McGill Emeritus Professor of Law Paul-André Crépeau will receive a doctorate Honoris Causa from university president Bernard Teyssié. This ceremony has a very special meaning for Professor Crépeau, since it was within these walls that he defended, in 1955, his doctoral thesis on "La responsabilité civile du médecin et de l'établissement hospitalier, Étude comparée du droit français, du Common Law et du droit civil de la Province de Québec" (Physician's and Hospital's Civil Responsibility, A Comparative Study of French Law, Common Law and Quebec Civil Law). Few academics have had the kind of long-term impact on the university that Paul-André Crépeau has had on the teaching of law at McGill as well as on the emergence of genuine research in civil law and comparative law in Canada. As soon as he arrived at McGill in 1959, this law graduate and assistant professor at the Université de Montréal faculty of law, Rhodes scholar and graduate of Oxford University, doctor of law from the Université de Paris and graduate of the International Faculty for the Teaching of Comparative Law in Strasbourg, became one of the major architects of the 1960s reforms in the McGill Faculty of Law. In the words of his colleague and former dean, Professor Yves-Marie Morrissette, "It is thanks to men of Paul-André Crépeau's stature that law acquired its letters patent in our universities, that it transformed itself from mere practical knowledge to an intellectual discipline open to critique and the input of related disciplines."
If Professor Crépeau's career expanded along the three axes of fundamental civil law, comparative law and medical-hospital law, he is best known among his fellow citizens as president of the Office of the Revision of the Quebec Civil Code and co-author of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. As he once told a reporter from Maîtres magazine (January 1991): "Aside from the daily joys of teaching, having succeeded in presenting to the Quebec National Assembly a draft for a renewed Civil Code, including the explanatory commentaries which would serve as a foundation of civil society, has been a great moment in my career. This honour must, of course, be shared with more than 150 jurists, but it was my responsibility to come up with a finalized project, which I did on June 20, 1978. The presentation of the proposal to the National Assembly was a great occasion in my life. Another great moment was the presentation, with my late colleague Professor Frank R. Scott, of a proposal for a charter of human rights and freedoms to the Quebec Minister of Justice. [...] As it happens, ministers are always in a hurry. We had to come up with the charter plan at very short notice. We worked on it non-stop for many months, getting our inspiration in particular from international texts and, on the 25th of July 1971, to be exact, we presented the draft. This later inspired the Charter, which was ratified by the National Assembly in June 1975 and which became law the following year."
After completing the Quebec Civil Code revision, Professor Crépeau devoted himself to teaching and research as director of McGill's Institute of Comparative Law and as the founding Director of the Quebec Research Centre of Private and Comparative Law, which flourished under his leadership for over 20 years. Throughout this period, he held the prestigious Arnold Wainwright Chair in Civil Law.
It would be a mistake to assume that these heavy responsibilities prevented Professor Crépeau from seeing what the world had to offer. Over the course of his career he has been a visiting professor at the International Faculty for the Teaching of Comparative Law in Strasbourg, at Université Laval, at Edinburgh University, and at faculties of Law in Vienna, Poitiers, Tulane, the University of British Columbia and Louisiana State University, in addition to spending time abroad working on an international project for the harmonization of private law (UNIDROIT).
At the launching of Mélanges, presented by McGill colleagues to Paul-André Crépeau on June 5, 1997, Dean of Law Stephen Toope answered the question "Why were Crépeau and McGill made for each other?" "The answer is complex," he replied. "Undoubtedly, a person as talented as Professor Crépeau would have reached the highest summits anywhere. It is at McGill, however, that Crépeau became the personification of the ideal 'universitaire,' as John Brierley already emphasized. Has McGill contributed to this evolution? I sincerely believe so. Professor Crépeau found at the McGill Faculty of Law the right intellectual environment for one so imbued with the desire to explore simultaneously the rigours of doctrine, the impulses of law reform and the maze of comparative law. Today, still, McGill is at the forefront in the comparative study and critique of private law, which has always been at the heart of Professor Crépeau's preoccupations. And McGill's growing bilingualism could not have been perceived as anything but agreeable by this young francophone from Saskatchewan."
