On May 2, 2025, the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law celebrated its 50th anniversary. Colleagues and long-time friends gathered to discuss “50 years of interpreting and defining the law.” The speakers were former directors and assistant directors of the Centre.
The conference program considered language as a matrix of law, where to say is already to say the law, if we refer to the Latin meaning of the term directum. To say is also to show (dicere) and to criticize (from the Greek krinein). Legal codification and lexicography projects, such as the critical edition of the Civil Code or the Dictionaries of Private Law, attempt to define a law in perpetual crisis. This tension is reflected in verbal morphology, between transparency and opacity, and in the migration of the word fait, which has moved from law to science, revealing a complex semantic genealogy.
Moderated by Laurence Bich-Carrère, the first-round table discussed the theme “Voice and path: uniting and bringing together justice and fairness.” Professor Véronique Fortin explored the parallels between legal definition and ethnography, two ways of writing about the world that question the normativity of language. Professor Alexandra Popovici highlighted the role of sound in the way the law is expressed in Quebec. In dictionaries, expressions such as “Au Québec” maintain a tone specific to the Quebec context. Professor Marie-Andrée Plante addressed the responsibility of lawyers who work on dictionaries and who hesitate between terminological loyalty and the desire for subversion. The instability of legal words causes them to oscillate between their formal meaning and their common meaning. In closing, France Allard celebrated ambiguity in literature as a source of intrigue and richness, while emphasizing that in law, it is avoided in order to preserve clarity. However, legal interpretation recognizes that meaning depends on context. Thus, legal language is torn between terminological rigor and interpretive openness.
The second round table of the day, moderated by Professor Gaële Gidrol-Mistral, focused on the theme “Sources and resources: identifying and repairing the law.” Noémie Gourde-Bouchard discussed the Minister's Comments, which occupy an ambiguous position between doctrine and official text, considering their publication after the Civil Code came into force, their didactic style, and their ministerial signature. Justice Nicholas Kasirer highlighted the aesthetic richness of legal maxims. Despite their low normative reliability, they play a role in the transmission of law. Their poetic form—rhymes, rhythms, repetitions—gives them an evocative power that touches lawyers and inspires the editorial committee of the Centre's dictionaries. Professor David D'Astous questioned the status of obiter dictum in Quebec civil law, showing that it can sometimes acquire normative value despite codification. In closing, Professor Jean-Guy Belley emphasized that the Paul-André Crépeau Centre is entering a phase of questioning contemporary private law. He proposes a meso-legal approach to understanding and reforming tools such as standard contracts, taking into account social dynamics and collective actors.
The third panel addressed the theme “Identifying and discerning: working (with) concepts.” Professor Étienne Cossette-Lefebvre defended the idea that we can be owners of our own bodies, revisiting the concepts of ownership and property through their etymology. Professor Yaëll Emerich proposed breaking with the person-thing duality by personifying nature, inspired by environmental ethics and Indigenous ontology. She called for a paradigm shift in which humans recognize themselves as an integral part of the Earth. Professor Patrick Forget analyzed the notion of “condition of application” in civil law based on the classic triad: fault, harm, and causation. He proposed a definition based on legal logic: a condition is fulfilled if it allows the legal element to produce its effect. Professors Vincent Forray and Sébastien Pimont showed that the concept of the rule of law is fundamentally complex, polysemic, and irreducible to a technical definition. Attempting to define it amounts to imposing a single meaning, which obscures the tensions, values, and representations it carries. Finally, Professor Lionel Smith distinguished between the concepts of legal duty and legal obligation, which are often confused. Legal duty is a legal requirement imposed on a person, while obligation implies a patrimonial relationship between debtor and creditor.
The last and fourth panel of the day focused on the theme “Body and becoming one: expressing and defining a right in flux.” Pierre Deschamps examined the impact of medical assistance in dying on health law. It is bringing about a major transformation in the legal framework of medical consent by redefining the relationship between patient and professional and raising new questions about dignity, autonomy, and suffering. Professor Jean-Frédéric Ménard explored the transformations of consent in a context of technological acceleration, particularly in medicine, bioethics, and health law. Technology is profoundly changing our relationship to the body, death, and the person itself, which is becoming partly constituted by technology. Laurence Saint-Pierre Harvey analyzed the evolution of compensatory payments in light of recent reforms, highlighting the difficulties associated with valuing non-monetary contributions in parental unions. She proposed basing compensation on parental authority obligations rather than unjust enrichment. In closing, Professor Régine Tremblay analyzed recent amendments to the Civil Code, highlighting their impact on three “bodies”: the legal text, the female body, and the body of laws. The law continues to convey an implicit normativity regarding sexuality and parenthood. This reflection highlights how legislators “become one” with the law, influencing social and legal representations.
The Centre thanks the Chamber of Notaries for its support, which made this event a great success.
