Margaret Somerville will receive an honorary doctorate from St. Mark’s College

Professor Margaret Somerville is to receive the Doctor of Sacred Letters (honoris causa) from St. Mark's College, British Columbia, that institution's highest honour. The degree will be conferred by the Most Reverend J. Michael Miller, csb, Archbishop of Vancouver and Chancellor of St. Mark's College, on May 2, 2010 during the College's convocation ceremony.

"We are honoured to present this distinguished award to Professor Margaret Somerville, an individual whose passion and vision have played a key role in opening dialogue on complex legal and ethical issues and the decision-making that shapes our society," says Dr. John Stapleton, Principal pro tem of St. Mark's College.

In addition to holding professorships in both the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine at McGill, Professor Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law (the first woman in Canada to hold a named Chair in Law) and is the Founding Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. She is the author of The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit (2000), and Death Talk: the Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (2001). She presented the 2006 CBC Massey Lectures, which were published as a book under the title The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (House of Anansi Press, 2006).