Launched in September 2021 under the auspices of the Professorship in Business Law, the McGill Seminars in Business and Society bring together renowned practitioners and scholars, judges and civil society activists to engage with current developments in Canadian and transnational business law. The Fall 2021 seminars are held via Zoom and admission is free. All are welcome.
Winter 2024
- 01 March 2024: With Professor Suzanne Bouclin - University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Common Law. 2024 Canadian National Negotiation Competition - Keynote Address & Negotiation Master Class : Cognitive Errors in Negotiation
Fall 2023
- 01 November 2023: With Prof. Olivia Smith - Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University. Addressing Human Trafficking: Paving the Way for an Effective Modern Slavery Response in Canada
- 06 November 2023: With Delia Cristea - Partner and General Counsel, Power Sustainable. The Green Transition In The Corporate Sector Hope, Challenges, And What It Takes To Succeed - Practical Aspects -
- 08 November 2023: With Coro Strandberg - President, Strandberg Consulting Founding Chair, Canadian Purpose Economy Project. 'Corporate Purpose’ And The Urgency Of Transformation
Winter 2023
- 08 March 2023: With Cynthia A. Williams - Professor of Law | Indiana University, Maurer School of Law. The Culture Wars Jump the Tracks: Private Climate Governance, “Net Zero” Prospects, and Politics
- 15 March 2023: With Professor Richard Janda and Iseoluwa Akintude DCL (PhD) candidate. Bringing Corporate Purpose into the Mainstream: Directions for Canadian Law
Fall 2022
- 28 September 2022: Peter Kolla, Partner Goodmans LLP, Toronto, The Corporation in Litigation: Reflections from a Bay Street Lawyer
- 3 October 2022: Nadia Chiesa, Partner, Weir Foulds, Toronto, Litigation and Arbitration on behalf of vulnerable parties in a Transnational Context
- 11 November 2022: Professor Penelope Simons & Professor Amy Salyzyn (U Ottawa), Professional responsibility and the defence of extractive corporations in transnational human rights and environmental litigation in Canadian courts
Winter 2022
- 19 January 2022: Kilian Bälz - Transnational Corporations and Infrastructure Development: Finance, Accountability, and Human Rights
- 09 February 2022: Alan Dignam - The AI Corporation: Corporate Governance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
- 14 February 2022: Sophie Schiller - La loi relative au devoir de vigilance après cinq ans: expériences, leçons, futurs
- 18 February 2022: Ryan Abbott - Artificial Intelligence as Author and Inventor
- 07 March 2022: Darren Rosenblum - Power & Pay in the C-Suite
- 11 March 2022: Christian Schöne - Regulating Global Supply Chains
- 14 March 2022: Elisabeth Neelin - Finding Precedent in the Unprecedented: The Continued Impacts of COVID on Litigation and Dispute Resolution
All Seminars
- 8 November 2021: Shahla Ali - Advancing Global Stakeholder Representation Through Decentralized Transnational Dispute Resolution: A View from the Asia Pacific
- 29 October 2021: Kara Preedy - Labour & Employment Law: The German Experience
- 25 October 2021: Cynthia A. Williams - Corporations & Climate Change: Directors' Legal Obligations & Litigation
- 4 October 2021: Simon Archer - The Rising Tide of Climate Litigation: The Strategy and Politics
- 22 September 2021: Jonathan Price and Bernhard Maier - Cyberspace Law: ‘Big Data’, Algorithmic Governance and Democracy
Seminar Videos
Winter 2022
Alan Dignam - The AI Corporation: Corporate Governance in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 08/02/2022
The lecture examines three key aspects of the impact of AI on corporate governance. First, the tech industry’s general governance disfunction focused on highly controlling founders, the financing of technology and its impact on operational AI. Second, the corporatisation of AI development as it has moved rapidly in recent years from the universities to the tech companies creating a tension between academic values and corporate utility that in turn creates AI operational disfunction. Third, it examines the impact of operational AI on the corporation as a legal and economic entity which may remove the mitigating function of the board of directors creating a very direct form of market capitalism without any employee, environmental, community or short v long term mitigation of corporate actions.
Winter 2022
Sophie Schiller - La loi relative au devoir de vigilance après cinq ans: expériences, leçons, futurs. 14/02/2022
La France a été le premier pays à introduire une loi pour imposer aux sociétés de rédiger un plan de vigilance pour prévenir les atteintes graves envers les droits humains et les libertés fondamentales, la santé et la sécurité des personnes ainsi que l'environnement. Ces obligations s'imposent aux sociétés qui emploient plus de 5000 salariés en son sein ou au moins 10000 dans le groupe. 5 ans après, il est intéressant de faire un bilan de l'application de ce texte et des perspectives européennes actuelles pour étendre son application.
Winter 2022
Ryan Abbott - Artificial Intelligence as Author and Inventor. 18/02/2022
AI and people do not compete on a level-playing field. Self-driving vehicles may be safer than human drivers, but laws often penalize such technology. People may provide superior customer service, but businesses are automating to reduce their taxes. AI may innovate more effectively, but an antiquated legal framework constrains inventive AI. Ryan argues that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior and proposes a new legal principle of "AI Legal Neutrality" to ultimately improve human well-being. Among other things, in intellectual property law, AI Legal Neutrality means that we ought to provide intellectual property protection for the creative and inventive output of machines, even in the absence of traditional human authors and inventors, and even allow machines to be authors and inventors as a matter of law. Ryan is spearheading a series of legal test cases around the world seeking patent protection for AI-generated inventions and seeking to list the AI inventor as a patent inventor, with the AI's owner as the owner of any resultant patent rights.
Winter 2022
Darren Rosenblum - Power & Pay in the C-Suite. 07/03/2022
Over the past few decades, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay has risen spectacularly, as has debate regarding why this has occurred and whether policy should or can correct it. Yet one glaring fact about the C-Suite eludes much of the corporate governance literature and executive compensation policy reforms and proposals: the C-Suite, particularly the CEO role, has long been and continues to be dominated by men. Despite making up half the workforce, few women lead companies in corporate America. Only 8% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women, and women make up less than a quarter of C-level executives. Ample evidence shows that when women come to dominate a profession, the salary of that profession drops. This is particularly true in high-paid white-collar jobs. In a recent essay, published in Inequality Inquiry, we pose the question of whether the opposite proves equally true: as men dominate a profession, does the salary of that profession rise? Might masculinity be the culprit behind increasingly outrageous CEO compensation packages? The essay begins to explore the correlation between executive compensation and men’s domination over senior executive roles, focusing on the CEO position. We delve into various theories that could help explain why men dominate the most lucrative role in corporate America. We argue that law and corporate governance need to account for these theories in designing solutions that address gender disparity in the CEO role.