Visitors to RGCS, 2019-20
Two visiting professors and one postdoctoral fellow will join the Research Group on Constitutional Studies this academic year.
Geoffrey Sigalet has been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in RGCS and Political Science. He holds an MA in Political Science from McGill and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton, and has held fellowships at Stanford Law School and Queen's University Faculty of Law. He specializes in public law and political theory, with an emphasis on constitutionalism, constitutional dialogue, and republicanism. He is the coeditor of Constitutional Dialogue: Rights, Democracy, Institutions (co-edited with Grégoire Webber and Rosalind Dixon), recently published by Cambridge University Press. In the winter semester of 2020 he will teach POLI 432 Selected Topics: Comparative Politics, with the topic "Comparative Bills of Rights."
Jean-Fabien Spitz will be a visiting professor in Political Science and RGCS in the winter semester of 2020; he will teach an honours undergraduate seminar on "Liberalism and property rights" in Political Science. Spitz is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the University of Paris I, and is one of the leading French specialists in John Locke's political philosophy. His books include La liberté politique : essai de généalogie conceptuelle; Bodin et la souveraineté; L'amour de l'égalité : essai sur la critique de l'égalitarisme républicain en France, 1770-1830; and John Locke et les fondements de la liberté moderne,
Fernando Tesón will hold the Visiting Fulbright Chair in Constitutional and Political Theory at RGCS in the winter semester of 2020. On March 19, 2020, he will deliver a talk in the RGCS Lecture Series on the values, institutions, and principles of a free society. Tesón is Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law, and a leading authority in the philosophy of international law. His is the author or coauthor of books including Debating Humanitarian Intervention: Should We Try to Save Strangers?; Justice at a Distance: Extending Freedom Globally; Rational Choice and Political Deliberation; A Philosophy of International Law; and Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality.
RGCS is a unit of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University. It brings together scholars in political theory and philosophy, public and constitutional law, legal philosophy, and constitutional-level empirical political science.