CANCELLED - Law Actually: Intimacy and Trust - McGill Graduate Law Conference

WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THIS CONFERENCE IS CANCELLED

The Graduate Law Students Association (GLSA) of McGill University’s Faculty of Law is pleased to announce the 13th annual McGill Graduate Law Conference, to be held on May 7-8, 2020 in Montreal, Canada.

See the Call for Submissions (deadline: 28 February 2020)

Conference website: mcgill.ca/agcl

“Law Actually”: Intimacy and Trust

Law invokes seriousness. One tends to see it to be objective, and even impersonal. It “must be public, universal, and reasonable. Emotion, understood as mere inclination and based in a self-interest, individual perspective, or self-reference that cannot apply to all alike, is irrelevant and distracting to the obligation to do one's duty.” (Meyer, The Justice of Mercy, 11). To think like a lawyer is to maintain a safe distance from the issue at hand.

Yet, law permeates our relationships. Law regulates intimate issues in personal relationships (such as those with our parents and our spouses) and also professional relationships. Legal norms tend to operate on the basis that we may or may not trust each other to carry out our respective duties. This element of trust also applies to many relationships that are deemed to be of a “legal” nature, such as contracts, commercial transactions, and international relations.

This conference is an invitation to approach ‘law’ as a more intimate discipline and to engage in legal scholarship as an exercise in intimacy and trust.

Dean Maxwell and Isle Cohen Doctoral Seminar Series in International Law

The conference will be held in collaboration with the Dean Maxwell and Isle Cohen Doctoral Seminar Series in International Law, which is held in honour of the late Maxwell Cohen and his wife Isle. In 2020, this seminar will take the form of a half-day panel discussion on international law topics inspired by the conference theme.