Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry

See his SSRN page and his Policy Options page.

Biography

Professor Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry has taught in the areas of health and disability law, jurisprudence, applied ethics as well as international and domestic human rights. His recent research has focused on health policies, bioethics and theories of autonomy and equality rights. He is the lead convenor of McGill’s Disability Working Group.

He has advised disability organizations on strategic litigations since 2015, and been consulted by the Quebec Bar, the federal Department of Justice and the Senate on health policies and equality issues. He has presented at academic series and conferences across North America and Europe, and his research has been funded by FQRSC and SSHRC grants and the Quebec Bar Foundation.

Professor Beaudry is interested in supervising graduate and postdoctoral students working on topics that relate to health law and bioethics, disability law/ethics, animal law/ethics, human rights law/theory, as well as other philosophical approaches to legal concepts and (in)justice.

Education

• DPhil, University of Oxford, 2014
• LLM, Harvard Law School, 2007
• Member of the Quebec Bar, 2006
• BCL/LLB, McGill University, 2004

Employment

• Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, joint appointment with the School of Population and Global Health, McGill University, 2023-
• Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, joint appointment with the Institute of Health and Social Policy, McGill University, 2021- 2023 
• Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, joint appointment with the Institute of Health and Social Policy, McGill University, 2018-2021
• Assistant Professor, Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2015-2018.
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Biomedical Ethics Unit, McGill University, 2014-2015.
• Boulton Research and Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 2013-2014.
• Tutor, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, 2011-2012.
• Henigson Fellow (Harvard Human Rights Program), Center for Justice and International Law (Buenos Aires office), 2008-2009.
• University Trainee to Sir Kenneth Keith and Peter Tomka, International Court of Justice, 2007-2008.
• Law Clerk to the Honourable Marie Deschamps, Supreme Court of Canada, 2005-2006.

Publications

Authored books

• The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability at the Margins of Justice and Morality (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
• Dialogues démocratiques en Amérique latine. La liberté d’expression comme droit d’accès à l’espace public (Québec : Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008).

Selected articles and chapters

• ‘Ableism’s New Clothes: Achievements and Challenges for Disability Rights in Canada', (2024) 74(1) University of Toronto Law Journal 1-40.
• 'Death as “Benefit” in the Context of Non-voluntary Euthanasia', 43 (5) Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 329-354 (2022).
• ‘Property and the Freedom to Discriminate: Markets, Gifts, and the Scope of Anti-Discrimination Norms’, Modern Studies in Property Law (Hart Publishing, 2021). Co-authored with Aruna Nair.
• ‘Disability and Contractual Expectations’ (2021) 10.1 Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 207-237.
• ‘Somatic Oppression and Relational Autonomy: Revisiting Medical Aid in Dying Through a Feminist Lens’ (2020) 53:2 UBC Law Review 241-298.
• ‘Different Seeking Same: Playing with Aesthetic Distance in Disability Poetry’, (2020) Amodern 10.
• ‘Theoretical Strategies to Define Disability’, in David T. Wasserman and Adam Cureton (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
• ‘Are Animals Persons? Why Ask?’ (2019) 9(1) Journal of Animal Ethics 6-26.
• ‘Welcoming Monsters: Disability as a Liminal Legal Concept’ (2017) 29(2) Yale Journal of Law & Humanities 291-338.
• ‘The Vanishing Body of Disability Law: Power and the Making of the Impaired Subject’ (2018) 31 Canadian Journal of Family Law 7-56.
• ‘The Intellectually Disabled Witness and the Requirement to Promise to Tell the Truth’ (2017) 40(1) Dalhousie Law Journal 239-278.
• ‘Beyond (Models of) Disability?’ (2016) 41(2) Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 210-228.
• ‘A Task-Sensitive Ethics of Motivation’ (2015) 6(1) American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience 22-24.

Areas of interest

Disability Law and Disability Studies; Health Law and Bioethics; Legal Theory and Human Rights.