Speaker abstracts and biographies are provided below.
Schulich School of Law
Sheila Wildeman is Director of Dalhousie University’s Health Justice Institute and Professor at Dalhousie's Schulich School of Law, where she teaches Administrative Law, Poverty Law, Public Health Law and Imprisonment Law. She is Co-Chair (with Renford Farrier) of East Coast Prison Justice Society, which hosts a jail oversight and assistance line. Her recent research focuses on disability-based isolation, exploring possibilities and limits of legal remedies for isolation in prison and health spaces (see eg, Ch. 46 in Anita Szigeti et al, Canadian Anthology on Mental Health and the Law (2024)). Since 2020 Sheila has supported arts-based action research collective “My Home My Rights” to produce videos and an art show celebrating the intersectional justice insights of individuals who learn and communicate in ways described as intellectual disability.
Relational Autonomy and Mental Health Disability: Cultivating Judgment in the Company of Diverse Others
In this essay, I ask what it means to think, learn, and grow in the company of others and what reciprocal lessons emerge from the body of work described as relational theory and "supported decision making," including in contexts of what is called mental health crisis. A central challenge I identified two decades ago---that of surfacing intersectional power in assessments of legal capacity while redirecting attention to the relational conditions (including social determinants) of judgment---remains a central challenge today. But much has changed, as philosophical and political interventions in resistance to ableist neo-liberalism have proliferated alongside practical strategies for promoting relational judgment over crisis-related coercion. The sustainability of these emergent alternatives is in question, however -- encouraging inquiry into the conditions of relational scholarship, and with this, the value of slow thinking, continuous with friendship and solidarity forged across deep difference through community-engaged research and praxis.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Professor Benjamin L. Berger is Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He held the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law and in 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. Professor Berger served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018. He holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University. His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence. He has published broadly in these fields and his work has appeared in leading legal and interdisciplinary journals and edited collections.
Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Moa Bladini is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focuses on criminal law and criminal procedure, with a particular emphasis on sexual and gender-based violence, both online and offline. Recurring themes in her work include power, judicial legitimisation strategies, and fundamental legal values. She has been part of several comparative projects analysing Nordic and European legislation and has extensive experience with interdisciplinary research. In addition, her work critically examines concepts such as objectivity, autonomy, and rationality, exploring how these ideals function in legal practice.
Lived Autonomy of Judges in Everyday Life in Court: Expanding Nedelsky’s Relational Approach
This paper examines the autonomy of judges and the independence of courts in Sweden. It takes as its starting point the concept of lived autonomy, developed together with Dr Wanna Svedberg Andersson, and asks what judicial autonomy looks like when approached not as an abstract ideal but as something enacted, learned, displayed, and sustained in the everyday life of courts (Bladini & Svedberg Andersson 2020; Svedberg Andersson & Bladini 2021). Inspired by Jennifer Nedelsky’s profoundly influential account of relational autonomy, I argue that judicial autonomy is not best understood as detachment from context and relationships, but as a situated and relational capacity shaped within institutional life (Nedelsky 2011).
The paper identifies a set of factors that may both strengthen and threaten judges’ autonomy in daily practice, including formal, administrative, collegial, public, political, and educational conditions. On this basis, it suggests that the independence of courts depends not only on constitutional guarantees and formal safeguards, but also on how judges experience, negotiate, and perform autonomy in practice (Bladini, Svedberg Andersson & Uhnoo 2026).
The paper is also a point of departure for a forthcoming comparative study, developed together with colleagues in Bologna, Budapest, and Cambridge, in which this framework will be expanded to analyse enabling and constraining conditions for judges and courts in Italy, Hungary, and the UK. In this way, lived autonomy is proposed as a relational socio-legal framework for understanding judicial independence across legal systems and legal cultures.
York University
Dr. Bunting is Professor of Law & Society and York Research Chair (YRC) in International Gender Justice & Peacebuilding (2024-29). Her research expertise includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods; feminist international law; contemporary slavery; and SGBV in war. From 2010-2022, she directed an international research collaboration, Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnership for the study of enslavement, marriage and masculinities, with community-based researchers and women’s rights scholars in the DRC, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Canada and England.
She is the co-editor of Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio Univ. Press, 2016) with Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts; Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2017; Cornell Univ. Press, 2018) with Joel Quirk; and Research as more than extraction: Knowledge production and sexual violence in post conflict African societies(Ohio Univ. Press, 2023) with Allen Kiconco and Joel Quirk. She has a forthcoming volume, Just Methods: Communities of practice in law and society research (Hart, 2026).
Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Dr. Patricia Cochran is an Associate Professor at the UVic Faculty of Law, where she has taught constitutional law, legal methodologies, feminist legal theories, statutory interpretation, equality and human rights law and evidence law. Her research sits at the intersection of legal and political theory, with a focus on theories of judgment as a resource for thinking about the demands of law and justice in the context of pluralism, inequality and colonialism. Patricia is currently exploring these themes in a variety of subject areas including agonistic constitutionalism, technologically mediated legal processes, and multijural statutory interpretation.
Embodied engagement with legal texts and the creation of a common world
One important aspect of Nedelsky’s relational theory is its critical attention to the affective and embodied aspects of law and judgment. In this paper, I explore how these insights can be brought to bear on the way texts generate legal and political relationships, and the role that genre conventions and rhetorical practices shape the character of those relationships. Specifically, I engage with application forms as a genre of legal text. What can be learned about law from the affective qualities solicited and expressed through application forms? I argue that Nedelsky’s account of judgment as an embodied and relational practice allows us to understand in a nuanced and material way how legal texts, such as application forms, play a role in structuring the relationships that make up the legal world. Drawing connections to both Hannah Arendt and Dorothy Smith, I argue that Nedelsky’s approach visibilizes opportunities for agency and durable community.
Toronto Metropolitan University, Faculty of Arts
Dr. Anna Corrigal Flaminio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Law and Social Work. Anna has worked together with Indigenous youth and residential school survivors at Metis and First Nation organizations for the past 25 years. Her research focuses primarily on R v. Gladue and the applicability of Cree-Metis laws to justice, along with focusing on prairie Metis women's wellness and the applicability of Indigenous spiritual methodologies.
Indigenous Kin-Visiting: An Urban Indigenous Justice Approach in the Criminal Legal System
This presentation will discuss my forthcoming book project, Indigenous Kin-Visiting: An Urban Indigenous Justice Approach in the Criminal Legal System. The book offers "Indigenous kin-visiting" as analytical lens and Indigenous deliberative approach for supporting urban Indigenous peoples involved in the criminal justice system. In bringing to bear an urban Indigenous kinship-visiting approach, I focus on the Cree/Metis laws of wahkotowin (law of kinship relationships) and kiyokewin (the action and laws of visiting). I combine these two Indigenous legal principles together -- wahkotowin and kiyokewin - to suggest an effective urban "Indigenous kin-visiting" procedural approach that ensures non-Indigenous legal representatives and Indigenous peoples are better relating, visiting, and building stronger kinship relationships while entrenched within the criminal justice system.
University of Waterloo
Anna Drake (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Waterloo. Anna works in the area of democratic theory with a focus on deliberative democracy, intersectionality, and activism. Her current research examines structural injustice in deliberative theory and analyzes ways deliberative systems might better respond to problems such as systemic racism and sexism. She is the author of Activism, Inclusion, and the Challenges of Deliberative Democracy (UBC Press, 2021) and co-author of Legislating Under the Charter: Parliament, Executive Power, and Judicial Norms about Rights (University of Toronto Press, 2023). She has published in a number of journals, including Contemporary Political Theory and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationali
Obligations and Refused Connections: Reimagining responsibility in the relational context
Given the scope of social injustice and the complex ways we’re implicated in it, affecting meaningful change can be overwhelming. This is exacerbated by the fragmented ways we’re encouraged to view our roles and responsibilities. Individual-centred approaches are deliberate: they divide and disengage people in more and less obvious ways and, in doing so, sustain structural injustice. With a starting claim that people can and ought to confront their own position in structural injustice, I draw from Young’s Responsibility for Justice (2011) and revisit her social connection model. Combining relational theory (Nedelsky 2011), asymmetrical democracy (Hooker 2016), and anti-capitalist intersectional analysis (CRC 1979; Taylor 2017), I examine responsibility for structural injustice through failures and evasions in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. I ask what it means to fulfil obligations in robust, and meaningfully relational, ways, and argue we need a higher standard of what it means to discharge our obligations. I ask how we might use the social connection model in ways that take our relational obligations more seriously, confront a lack of solidarity, and dismantle structural injustice.
Peter A. Allard School of Law, UBC
Julen Etxabe is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Jurisprudence and Human Rights at Allard School of Law, UBC. Etxabe holds an LLM degree from the European Academy of Legal Theory and obtained his doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School, under the supervision of James Boyd White. He is the author of The Experience of Tragic Judgment (2013) and editor and co-editor of three other books: Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (2014), Rancière and Law (2018) and Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (2019). His current research combines legal and literary theory to identify a new dialogical, Bakhtinian model of judgment emerging in the area of human rights
Relational Authority
Inspired by Jennifer Nedelsky’s groundbreaking work on law’s relations, this talk will attempt to elaborate on a notion of “relational authority,” drawn from the reasoning practices of the European Court of Human Rights. This notion is not identical with what Nicole Roughan, in a welcome correction to Joseph Raz, has labeled “relative authority,” according to which when there are multiple legitimate authorities in interacting or overlapping domains, and no outweighing reason to have just one singular authority, then those legitimate authorities must coordinate, cooperate, or tolerate one another in order to be legitimate for their subjects. Rather, relational authority borrows from the work of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the broader hermeneutic tradition where authority is not as a thing anyone can possess, but a form of relation one is already engaged in.
Windsor University, Faculty of Law
Danardo Jones is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, faculty of Law. Professor Jones comes to the Faculty with years of criminal law experience, having worked as a staff lawyer at various Legal Aid organizations across Eastern Canada (Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia) and Ontario. He was also the Director of Legal Services for the African Canadian Legal Clinic. In that role, he intervened in precedent-setting cases before the Supreme Court of Canada. Professor Jones's research interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, criminal sentencing, and race and the law. His research draws on scholarly literature from law and cognate disciplines, including penology and criminology, law and geography, philosophy of law, critical race theory, and prison abolitionist and restorative justice literature
Race, Risk and Pre-Trial Release
Until recently, Canadian bail law provided limited legislative and judicial guidance on how race should be considered in bail decisions. This changed with the Liberal government’s Bill C-75 reforms, which codified the principle of restraint in ss. 493.1 and 493.2 of the Criminal Code. Reflecting the Supreme Court’s direction in R v Antic, s. 493.1 requires decision-makers to release accused persons at the earliest opportunity on the least onerous conditions. In addition, ss. 493.2(a) and (b) mandate particular attention to the systemic and background factors affecting Indigenous peoples and individuals from vulnerable communities. However, given the recent political discourse and legislative amendments, there has been a discernible attitudinal shift among various stakeholders, including jurists, the Crown, and police agencies, toward prioritizing public safety. Empirical evidence does not support claims that crime is rising in Canada, nor the assertion that the rule of law is in crisis due to a substantial risk of reoffending by individuals on judicial interim release. This shift risks eroding the principle of restraint, normalizing more restrictive bail practices, and producing serious consequences for accused persons and for the integrity of the criminal justice system. In effect, bail may begin to function as a proxy for punishment, thereby undermining the presumption of innocence.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Emily Kidd White is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She holds a J.S.D. and an LL.M. from New York University School of Law, where she won the Jerome Lipper Prize for Highest Standing in the Program. Dr. Kidd White writes on constitutional law and on legal and political philosophy, with a particular interest on the various roles emotions play in legal reasoning. She is the author of Emotions in Legal Reasoning (Oxford University Press, Legal Philosophy Series, forthcoming), and, along with Susan Bandes, Jody Madeira, and Kathryn Temple, she recently co-edited the Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (Edward Elgar, 2021).
University of Toronto
Rebecca E. Kingston is author of Plutarch’s Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England 1500-1800 (2022), Public Passion. Rethinking the Grounds for Political Justice (2011), Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux (1996), and she has edited several volumes and texts in the history of political thought as well as published numerous articles in the history of political thought. She is now working on a book on the tradition of the femmes fortes in seventeenth century France. entitled Plutarch’s Prism exploring the legacy of this classical thinker in the development of European political thought. She is Life Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. and recent holder of the RBC Oxford Bodleian Fellowship.
University of Victoria
Mara Marin is assistant professor of political theory at the University of Victoria. She is interested in the ways in which intersections of gender, race and class reproduce structures of oppression and in how collective action and legal reform can dismantle oppressive structures. Her first book, Connected by Commitment (Oxford University Press, 2017), examines the relation between descriptive, social-theoretical questions about the nature of oppression, normative questions of responsibility for structural injustice and conceptions of collective action that can transform oppressive structures. Her current book project, Structural Agency and Structural Obligations, argues that recent discussions of structural injustice rely on an individualist picture or action that is politically limiting because it makes invisible two features of political action - action’s “plural publicity” and its “socially structured” character. Her work has been published in American Political Science Review, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Hypatia, among others. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Chicago and Frankfurt University.
Conceptualizing Structure
This paper offers a conception of social structure. It makes three main claims. First, it argues that social structures are social relations that result from the interaction between social practices. Social structures, it follows, cannot be reduced to the sum of the social practices they are comprised of; they cannot be understood by looking at these practices in isolation from each other, but only by considering the multiple effects different practices have on each other. Structures are macroscopic phenomena (Frye 1983). Second, it argues that structural relations are hierarchical relations between structural positions. Structural positions (“woman”) are different from the social roles (“mother,” “dean,” “neighbor”) that constitute the social practices whose interaction constitutes a social structure. While different, the meanings attached to a social position – and therefore the relation it stands to other positions in the structure – are the result of the interaction between the social roles that the occupants of that structural position play in the different social practices that comprise a social structure. For instance, the meanings of “woman” in the structure of gender depends on the interaction between the social roles women play in the multiplicity of practices that comprise the structure of gender. It follows that the hierarchical nature of structural relations should be understood in terms of these meanings attached to structural positions. As such, they are better understood as inequalities of status – a relation between a social inferior and superior – rather than as defined by unequal access to goods. In making this claim I reject Iris Young’s conception of oppression as “the institutional constraint on self-development” (1990, 37-38). Third, it argues that structures – the social relations between structural positions – are sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources (Sewell 1992), which explains their functioning: how they reproduce themselves over time, and how they can change.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Roxanne Mykitiuk is a Full Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where she engages in research and teaching in the areas of Disability Law, Health Law, Bioethics and Family Law. She is the founder and Director of the Disability Law Intensive clinical program and the Director of Osgoode’s part-time LLM program specializing in Health Law. She is a member of the core faculty in the graduate program in Critical Disability Studies at York University. From 2018-2021 Professor Mykitiuk was the Faculty Co-Chair of Enable York and was the Chair of York University’s Senate from 2013-2015.
Professor Mykitiuk is nationally and internationally recognized for her work in disability law and the regulation of reproductive and genetic technologies and reproductive health more generally. From 1990-1992 she was Senior Legal Researcher for the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies. From 2002-2006 she was a member of the Ontario Advisory Committee on Genetics and from 2005-2008, she was a member of the Ethics Committee of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada. In 2009 Professor Mykitiuk was scholar in residence at the Law Commission of Ontario working on the Disability and Law Project. She is currently on the Board of Directors of ARCH Disability Law Clinic. Professor Mykitiuk has been consulted by a range of actors in policy making and litigation contexts and provided expert opinion related to her areas of expertise.
Jennifer Nedelsky, BA (Rochester) 1970, MA (Chicago) 1974, PhD (Chicago), 1977. Professor Jennifer Nedelsky joined Osgoode in January 2018. She was previously Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Toronto and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Legal Theory, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism.
Prior to joining U of T, Professor Nedelsky was a Killam postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University in 1979 where she taught until 1985 when she was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Toronto. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science in 1986 and promoted to full Professor in 1995. In 1991 and 1994, she was Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.
Professor Nedelsky's teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Theories of Judgment, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism. In addition to her book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, she has published numerous articles in these areas. She is co-editor with Ronald Beiner of Judgment, Imagination and Politics: Themes From Kant and Arendt (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), and is at work on a book Human Rights and Judgment: A Relational Approach to be published by Oxford University Press.
She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History and active in the American Political Science Association, the Law and Society Association, and the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. In 2000 she was awarded the Bora Laskin National Fellowship in Human Rights Research. Her book, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011) won the C.B. Macpherson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. Her latest book is jointly authored (with Tom Malleson), Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto, Oxford University Press, 2023.
University of New Brunswick Faculty of Law
Sarah-jane Nussbaum is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of New Brunswick. Her scholarship involves critical analysis of criminal law, with a particular focus on sentencing and legal education. She teaches Criminal Law, the Advanced Criminal Law Seminar, and Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Sarah-jane completed her PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School with the support of a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. She also holds an LLM from the University of Cambridge, where she was a recipient of the Right Honourable Paul Martin Sr. Scholarship, and she holds JD and BA degrees from the University of Saskatchewan. Sarah-jane previously served as a Law Clerk at the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan.
Sentencing's Relations: Reckoning with Colonialism in Canadian Sentencing Decisions
I would be pleased to share a draft chapter from my book project, which is under advance contract with University of Toronto Press. The book engages with the second theme of the symposium (reimagining responsibility and rethinking blame) by analyzing the ways in which some judges both work with, and critique, sentencing law as a tool for repairing colonial harm. I look closely at how some sentencing judges navigate their task of imposing a sentence on one individual in the face of colonial oppression affecting both Indigenous criminalized persons and Indigenous victimized persons. My focus is on examples of judges applying entrenched principles of individual responsibility and blame while also acknowledging the limits of this framework and attempting to expand marginal opportunities to address the social and institutional dimensions of wrongdoing and harm. I explore the possibilities and challenges that arise when judges’ decisions echo well-established calls for a transformation of the criminal legal system, and more fundamentally, of the relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Palma Paciocco is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. She holds an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, B.C.L. and LL.B. degrees from the McGill Faculty of Law, and a B.A. (Hons.) from the McGill Faculty of Arts. She served as a law clerk to the Honourable Justice Louise Charron of the Supreme Court of Canada and is called to the Bars of Ontario and New York. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of evidence law, criminal law and theory, criminal procedure, sentencing, and professional ethics. She has a particular interest in the role of discretionary decision-making within the criminal justice system, and her recent and current research explores issues including trial delay, the justifications for plea bargaining, the classification and treatment of expert evidence, and the actual and perceived tensions between accuracy and efficiency in the context of adjudicating evidence admissibility.
University of Toronto, Centre for Ethics
Dr. Inbar Peled is a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics. She researches and teaches in the areas of identity studies, criminal law, and professional ethics. Her dissertation, entitled Professionalizing Discrimination, explored the legal response to discriminatory policing and won the Law and Society Association (U.S.A.) 2024 Dissertation Prize, as well as the York University-wide Dissertation Award. As a human rights lawyer working with equity-deserving communities, Peled has spent the past decade studying identity-based discrimination and considering paths to transformation in the legal systems of multicultural societies. She received her PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School as a Vanier Scholar, under the supervision of Jennifer Nedelsky and Sonia Lawrence. She also holds an LL.M. from Columbia University, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and an additional master’s degree from the University of Toronto.
Three Conceptions of Responsibility: Legal Actors and the Crisis of Accountability in Policing
Traditional accounts of responsibility in criminal law often focus on the figure of the accused-- disproportionately those who are marginalized within structures of racial and social inequality. This paper shifts the focus to legal actors and how they both resist and reproduce discrimination, while evading and redistributing responsibility for it. It identifies three competing conceptions of responsibility that structure police-civilian encounters: responsibility as liability, responsibility as guilt, and responsibility as accountability. Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, these conceptions are shown to be unevenly applied across legal actors and offenders, generating a regime in which racialized individuals are subjected to forms of hyper-responsibility, while legal actors and law enforcement agents often evade accountability. Drawing on Jenny Nedelsky’s relational conception of autonomy, the paper argues that attention to legal actors’ interaction with self and others helps explain how multiple, and often inconsistent, conceptions of responsibility coexist in criminal law. This raises a broader question: can projects that seek to detach responsibility from blame—particularly in relation to marginalized offenders—be sustained without also rethinking the accountability of legal actors in the current system?
York University
Nicholas is a PhD Candidate in the Program for Social and Political Thought at York University. His research interests lie in democratic theory, political aesthetics, the history of political thought, and participatory politics. He is currently completing a dissertation that interprets the work of Hannah Arendt from the perspective of her appeal to exempla as the appropriate kinds of ‘standards’ for political judgment in pluralistic societies. He is also preparing a book project that develops the core insights of his dissertation in conversation with ongoing debates in democratic theory.
The Modern Equivalent of the Soul:' Searching for the Heart of Judgment with Jennifer Nedelsky
Over the last three and a half decades, Jenny Nedelsky has developed a relational theory of autonomy in critical conversation with Hannah Arendt’s writings on judgment. For Jenny, Arendt’s late turn to judgment offers important insights for understanding how autonomous judgment depends on thinking from the perspectives of diverse others. My paper aims to deepen Jenny’s relational reading of Arendtian judgment by addressing two inter-related puzzles within it: what is the relevant sense of ‘other perspective’ in judgment? how do other perspectives lead us to make good judgments in a (roughly) moral sense? I will explore these questions by placing Jenny’s evocative claim that judging requires a formal principle of equality coincident with ‘discovering the modern equivalent of the soul’ in conversation with Arendt’s own suggestion that the appropriate sources of normativity in judgment are not principles but exemplars.
University of Toronto Faculty of Law
David Schneiderman is Professor of Law and Political Science (courtesy) at the University of Toronto, where he teaches courses on Canadian, US, and comparative constitutional law and international investment law. He has been a visiting Professor of Law at such places as Gothenburg University, the University of Stockholm, the National University of Singapore, Georgetown University, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters and, in addition, the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s Promise (Cambridge UP 2008), Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law (Palgrave 2013), Red, White and Kind of Blue? The Conservatives and the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge UP, 2022), and Constitutional Review and International Investment Law: Deference or Defiance? (Oxford UP, 2024). Most recently, he published A Sociology of International Investment Law: Themes from Max Weber (Oxford UP, 2026).
Against Constitutional Property Rights
Should democracies constitutionally protect property rights? Or should incursions into property ownership be subject to ordinary democratic processes? The object of this paper is to highlight Jennifer Nedelsky’s distinct contribution to these debates that are ongoing in comparative constitutional law. Informed by contrasting U.S. and Canadian constitutional history, and shaped by her relational approach to rights, Nedelsky has navigated this contentious terrain by proposing that property be subject to vigorous debate in legislatures rather than in courts. Given the implications of property rights for equality, distributive justice, and power relations, she has arrived at a position that is faithful to the defence of constitutional democracy but also diffident in the service of democratic dialogue. This paper tracks Nedelsky’s approach paying particular attention to her intervention over whether to entrench property in the new South African Bill of Rights. Nedelsky’s diagnosis is contrasted with international treaty protections for foreign investors, having a global reach, that exhibit no such modesty.
McGill University
Dr. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. An internationally recognized expert on the comparative politics of race, her research focuses on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada, the United States, and beyond. She is the author of the award-winning books, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism and the Politics of the Census (2016) and The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (2022). She is the host and producer of the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s In/Equality podcast, and a contributing columnist for the Globe and Mail.
From BLM to the War on Woke: A relational analysis of racial progress and populist retreat
In the summer of 2020, hundreds of thousands of Canadians marched under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter (BLM), demanding a fundamental restructuring of the relational ties between the state, the police, and racialized communities. Yet, by 2025, this momentum was met by a profound populist backlash—characterized by the collapse of the Liberal leadership, a "war on wokeism," and a fractured consensus on DEI and immigration. Jenny Nedelsky’s ideas of relationally help us to think through how this shift is more than a political swing; it is a crisis of collective judgment and a reinvigoration of a defensive, atomistic individualism.
Drawing from scholarship on backlash politics (Alter and Zürn 2020) and Nedelsky’s critique of the "bounded self," this article explores how the BLM protests initially sought to foster societal relationally by exposing systemic patterns of subordination. However, it argues that these demands were, predictably, followed by a backlash that reframed them as threats to liberal universalism. By examining the facilitators of this backlash in both the U.S. and Canada, this project thinks through the potential of Canadian democracy to move past a narrow idea of equality and rights and instead build a constitutionalism grounded in mutual care and shared responsibility.
Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Margot Young is Professor at the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. She works in the areas of constitutional law, equality theory, feminist theory, and social justice. As a board member of several civil society organizations, Margot is invested in academic and activist collaboration.
Universidad de Concepción, Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales
Dr. Amaya Alvez is a Full Professor at the University of Concepción, Chile, in both the Department of Public Law and the Department of History and Philosophy of Law. She has been teaching and researching since 1998, with LLM studies completed at the University of Toronto (2006-2007) and a PhD at Osgoode Hall Law School (2007-2011). In 2022, she was a visiting scholar at Osgoode Hall, and in 2018-2019, she was a visiting professor at the University of Windsor, Ontario. Dr. Alvez also teaches at the Summer School of the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research focuses on Theory of Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, International Human Rights Law, and Constitutional Justice. She has published over 30 articles and chapters and coordinated interdisciplinary research. In 2021, Dr. Alvez was elected to the Chilean Constitutional Convention, focusing on decentralization, water rights, and indigenous rights.
Mapping ancestral lands of Andean indigenous peoples in Chile in the face of a 'Lithium rush'
This presentation offers a historical critical perspective on International Law concepts developed in Chile, focusing on their relation to indigenous land dispossession. Using the context of the Lithium rush, we examine how Latin American International Law and legal transplants based on "the civilizing mission" shaped notions of property, occupation, and effective control of ancestral lands. The 19th century legal fiction of indigenous land enclosure was enforced through land registration, violence, and war (Becker & Alvez, 2024). Over the last 50 years, a shift toward recognizing collective rights for indigenous peoples (ILO 169 Convention) and the legal personhood of nature (Alvez et al., 2021) has advanced indigenous worldviews. Focusing on the Lithium mining prospects in the Salar de Atacama, we explore indigenous consultation processes. to address the challenge of balancing human rights with environmental concerns, we draw on Jennifer Nedelsky's relational legal framework. We also address Chile's evolving legal recognition of indigenous territorial rights, particularly in the context of lithium extraction
Queen's University, Faculty of Law
Dr. Bita Amani is Professor of Law at Queen's University and Co-Director of Feminist Legal Studies Queen's, organizing an annual FLSQ International Women's Day conference for nearing two decades. She teaches courses in intellectual property, information privacy, and feminist legal studies (workshop) and is currently working on issues related to food law and governance; equality; intellectual property, user rights, the Sustainable Development Goals; algorithmic error; and privacy law. Dr. Amani served briefly as a legislative drafter for the Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario), Office of the Legislative Counsel (OLC, 2001); she was editor and annotations editor for the OLC E-laws Project; and has engaged in public policy work on a range of issues including as part of the Subcommittee on Gene Patenting to the Ontario Advisory Committee on New Predictive Genetic Technologies. She is adjunct faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School and is called to the bar of Ontario.
Toward an Edible Society: Rethinking Innovation and Sustainability in Consuming the (M)other
Feminist Adrienne Rich famously wrote "All human life on the planet is born of woman." To this we might add: and each is born consuming the (M)other. Life begins in relation to the other and that relationship is defined by consumption and cannibalization, by production and waste, and homeostasis. Life, from conception, depends on the health of the host, as mother and foetus engage in a DNA swap with profound implications for both; such agency and permeability of an imaginary bounded self is not limited to human actors but all nested beings including in our host metaphorically referenced as mother earth. A feminist gaze of material existence, as relational and symbiotic, helps transcend the limits of individualized conceptions to seed the discourse of "Progress" into the womb of care. If we are all food, the question of whether we remain edible as a society to sustain life must be confronted.
Queen’s University, Faculty of Law
Lindsay Borrows is an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law, where she teaches special topics in the field of Indigenous law. She was named the inaugural holder of the Queen's Law Professorship in Indigenous Law & Governance in 2025. Prior to joining Queen's, she worked as a lawyer and researcher at the Indigenous Law Research Unit (University of Victoria Faculty of Law), and as a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law. In both positions she provided legal support to Indigenous communities and organizations engaged in the revitalization of their own laws for application in contemporary contexts. She has worked on community-engaged projects with different legal traditions including Anishinaabe, Denezhu, Haíɫzaqv, Nlaka’pamux, nuučaan̓uł, St’át’imc, Syilx and Tsilhqot’in. She is particularly passionate about the possibilities within land-based legal education, and since 2014 she has co-facilitated various ‘on-the-land’, community-engaged Anishinaabe Law Camps in partnership with different law schools and communities across Ontario. Her book Otter’s Journey Through Indigenous Language and Law (UBC Press, 2018) explores the connections between language and law. Lindsay is Anishinaabe and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation.
A Tribute to Jenny Nedelsky: Finding New Stories for Law
This presentation will explore, through narratives, how Jenny’s scholarship and personal example have taught me a profound process for how to learn law. From our relationship, I will draw out themes like humility, mothering, curiosity, friendship, storywork and legal positivism, to celebrated how Jenny’s work has profoundly influenced me and the people I know.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Ruth Buchanan joined Osgoode Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. Prior to joining the Osgoode faculty, Professor Buchanan taught at the law schools of the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. Professor Buchanan also holds an ongoing appointment as a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she teaches in the Melbourne Law Masters program.
Professor Buchanan holds an SJD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an LLB from the University of Victoria and an AB from Princeton University. In 2011, Professor Buchanan founded the Law.Arts.Culture Colloquium, to create a vibrant forum for the discussion of emerging interdisciplinary work on law and humanities. Since that time, Professor Buchanan, through LAC, has hosted more than two dozen speakers, events and installations. She is also a past Director of the Graduate Program (Research), and a past co-Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies.
An interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work spans critical legal theory, sociology of law and cultural legal studies, Dr. Buchanan’s scholarship has engaged with a range of topics including NAFTA and labour rights, the WTO and global constitutionalism, social movements and resistance to globalization, Indigenous law and legal pluralism, law and film. She has published widely and collaborates frequently with legal scholars in Canada and internationally. Professor Buchanan co-edited the collections Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014) with Peer Zumbansen and Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (2012) with Sundhya Pahuja and Stewart Motha. She has published widely, including in the Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities; Miami Law Review; Leiden Journal of International Law; Law,Text,Culture; Journal of Legal Education, Nordic Journal of International Law; Osgoode Hall Law Journal, and the Journal of Law and Society. She has been involved in the editorial boards or editorial advisory boards of the Canadian Journal of Women and Law, Journal of Law, Culture and Humanities, Transnational Legal Theory.
In 2015-16, Professor Buchanan was awarded an Osgoode Hall Research Fellowship for her ongoing project, “Visualizing Developments,” which considers the variety of visual mechanisms through which knowledge about development is produced and disseminated by international institutions. Professor Buchanan is also currently writing a book on International Development with Sundhya Pahuja and Luis Eslava as part of the Routledge-Cavendish Critical Approaches to Law series.
Professor Buchanan has taught courses in the areas of: Globalization and Law, Law and Social Change, Trade, Human Rights and Development, Law and Film. In the Osgoode Graduate Program, she has taught the Legal Research seminar and convened the Study Group on Law in a Global Context. Professor Buchanan has supervised many LLM and doctoral students in the areas of law and development, legal theory, legal sociology, or visual legal studies and law and film.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Karen Drake (Anishinaabe, Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation) researches and teaches in the areas of Anishinaabe constitutionalism and law, the interplay between Indigenous law and state law, Canadian law as it affects Indigenous peoples, property law, and dispute resolution including civil procedure and Indigenous dispute resolution. Professor Drake served as Osgoode’s Associate Dean (Students) during the pandemic, from July 2020 to June 2023. She joined the Osgoode faculty in July 2017 from the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University where she had been a founding Co-Editor in Chief of the Lakehead Law Journal. Prior to joining Lakehead, she articled with Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, completed a clerkship with the Ontario Court of Appeal, served as a part-time judicial law clerk with the Federal Court, and practised with Ericksons LLP, focusing on legal issues impacting Indigenous peoples, human rights, and civil litigation.
Professor Drake has experience working with elders and other members of Anishinaabe First Nations to support the renewal and revitalization of laws and governance processes grounded in an Anishinaabe lifeworld. She is working toward learning Anishinaabemowin in aid of this work.
Professor Drake has presented at education seminars held for Canada’s Department of Justice, Ontario’s Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and the National Judicial Institute. She was the recipient of the Osgoode Legal and Literary Society’s Equity Award in 2018, and of the Osgoode Hall Law School Teaching Award in 2019.
She is a member of the legal advisory panel for RAVEN and previously served as a Commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, on the Board of Directors of the Indigenous Bar Association, and on the Board of Directors of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Dr. Carys Craig joined the faculty at Osgoode Hall Law School in 2002. She is the Academic Director of the Osgoode Professional Development LLM Program in Intellectual Property Law, a founding member of IP Osgoode (Osgoode’s Intellectual Property Law & Technology Program), and recently served as Osgoode’s Associate Dean (Research & Institutional Relations). In 2018, she held a MacCormick Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.
A recipient of multiple teaching awards, including the 2015 President’s University-Wide Teaching Award, Dr. Craig teaches JD, graduate and professional courses in the areas of intellectual property, copyright and trademark law, and legal theory. She researches and publishes widely on intellectual property law and policy, with an emphasis on authorship (drawing on critical and feminist theory), users’ rights and the public domain. She is the author of Copyright, Communication & Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law (2011), and the co-editor of Trade-marks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 2014) and Copyright: Cases and Commentary on the Canadian and International Law, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Carswell, 2013). Her award-winning work has been cited with approval by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Dr. Craig holds a First Class Honours Bachelor of Laws (LLB Hons) from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a Master of Laws (LLM) from Queen’s University in Kingston, and a Doctorate in Law (SJD) from the University of Toronto, where she was a graduate fellow of Ontario’s Centre for Innovation Law and Policy.
Graduate Research Supervision (LLM, PhD): Professor Craig is interested in supervising graduate research in the area of intellectual property (IP) law (domestic, comparative and/or international), with a focus primarily on copyright and/or trademark law and related fields. Her own scholarship in this area covers a wide variety of topics including concepts of authorship and ownership, fair dealing and user rights, freedom of expression, digital locks, technological neutrality, open access and open licensing models, trademark registration requirements, etc. While tackling particular doctrinal and policy issues at the forefront of IP law, Professor Craig's scholarship employs a critical theoretical approach (drawing on, e.g. feminist legal theory, critical race theory, cultural and literary theory). Current projects include work on critical theories of IP, racially disparaging trademarks; authorship and artificial intelligence; choreographic copyright; copyright's substantial similarity doctrine; moral rights, parody and satire.
Haverford College (USA)
Jessica Croteau is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Visiting Assistant Professor. She holds a PhD in political Science from Johns Hopkins University. Specializing in Political Theory and Ecological Political Thought, her research explores the positive possibilities within decline, arguing that deterioration is not inherently negative and that durability can sometimes be dangerous. Her work engages with decomposition and nonhuman theory to envision better worlds through an eco philosophy and ethics of affirmative modes of falling apart. Jessica is the winner of the 2023 Western Political Science Association William E. Connolly Award for her outstanding political theory paper in contemporary democratic thought. She also serves as Co Council for the Environmental Politics and Theory Related Group for the American Political Science Association and is the graduate fellow for the Ecological Design Collective. Her recent publication, Time in the Anthropocene, appeared in the Oxford Political Review.
Declining Well: A Right to Compose in More than Human Constitutionalism
Relational theories have long worked to dismantle individualistic frameworks that isolate the self from broader networks of care and responsibility. Expanding this tradition, my work engages relationality through the lens of ecological decay, asking what it might mean to cultivate an ethic of declining well. Dominant legal and political paradigms privilege endurance of institutions, bodies, and systems, while decay is often framed as failure. Yet the material world suggests another possibility: decline as generative, decay as necessary, and decomposition as a form of relationality that sustains life. Drawing from eco-philosophy, Indigenous legal traditions, and new materialist thought, this paper explores how embracing decline might reframe legal and ethical commitments beyond preservationist paradigms. How might relational autonomy account not just for interhuman dependencies, but for the necessary intermingling of human and nonhuman cycles of decomposition? I argue that a more than human constitutionalism must also recognize the right to decompose.
University of Victoria
Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in British Columbia where she directs the Animals & Society Research Initiative. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory. Professor Deckha’s work analyzes the gendered, culture, racialized, and species dimensions of law. She has published in law reviews, social science and humanities journals, and edited collections and is the author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders and director of the open access documentary series, A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law, available at https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/asri/animal-law-films/ and on YouTube: @ASRI-UVic. Professor Deckha is the recipient of multiple research grants for her work on animal law theory and reform, including transitioning away from animal-based farming and food systems as well as animal-based science research. In Spring 2024 she was a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich and a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich. Professor Deckha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.
Rights of (Mother) Nature: A Relational Feminist Framework for Legally Uplifting Animals?
Several influential accounts have identified the Rights of Nature as a generally promising theoretical and doctrinal framework to advance animals’ interests. The Rights of Nature commonly invokes the concept of Mother Earth to establish its legitimacy. Using Jenny Nedelsky’s relational theory as well as feminist-informed animal law literature, this paper asks whether the Rights of Nature, as a framework that relies on the gendered concept of the Earth as a mother, is a productive intersectional way to advance animals’ interests given sacrificial logics of motherhood in the human and animal realms. Would a legal doctrine based on respecting the Earth because the Earth is “our” mother 1) advance the interests of animals, many of whom are feminized and also burdened by gendered scripts and expectations around motherhood, and 2) respect feminist concerns about gender expectations for human mothers? Could a relational mothering discourse surface the plight of animals?
University of Alberta, Faculty of Law
Jessica Eisen is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. Her research interests include animals and the law, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, equality and antidiscrimination law, feminist legal theory, intergenerational justice, and law and social movements. Professor Eisen's research has been published in the Journal of Law and Equality, Animal Law Review, Canadian Journal of Poverty Law, Transnational Legal Theory, Queen's Law Journal, ICON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of British Columbia Law Review, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, and elsewhere.
Animal Relations
This presentation will seek to take up Jennifer Nedelsky's invitation in Law's Relations to explore the lessons of relational theory for the more-than-human world, with special attention to animals as relational beings. Topics explored will include the limits of individualistic approaches to animal rights and animal welfare, the supposed tensions between animal rights and rights of nature, and how relational theory can support a richer account of animal autonomy.
University of Toronto
Angela Fernandez is a Professor at the Jackman Law Faculty at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment in the Department of History. She is also the Director of the Animal Law Program at the Jackman Faculty of Law, where she oversees the production of the Brooks Animal Law Digest: Canada Edition. Her book Pierson v Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and the Professionalization of American Legal Culture (CUP) was published in 2018. Since 2019 she has been publishing and speaking about a quasi-property/quasi-person understanding of nonhuman animals. She is currently exploring how her quasi-hood approach might also work for environmental entities, including but not limited to subjects protected by the Rights of Nature.
Excluding Animals from Relationality: Equivalent Equality and Rights of Nature for Animals
In Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, Law (OUP 2012), Jennifer Nedelsky included a Coda to Chapter 4 discussing why animals and other life-forms were excluded from her concept of the relational self. Terming it a linguistic compromise that the language of inherent equality was reserved for human beings and the language of intrinsic worth was more appropriate for other entities such as animals and the environment, Nedelsky wrote that human beings get basic equality and everything else respect and concern that would include exhortations to responsibility rather than entitlement claims that must be met. As the word “compromise” suggests, at certain points in the Coda, it sounded like this boundary-drawing choice was a pragmatic one, perhaps even merely linguistic, motivated by the existing consensus about the need for equality as between humans and the lack of consensus with regard to obligations owed towards earth’s others. At other times, it seemed to be a more principled and categorical: “No one schooled in Western political thought would go for equality for animals.” Yet there are strains of equal or proximate equality between humans and other animals in animal rights law today. For example, a proposal in Finland stating that fundamental rights for animals will not be the same as for humans but there is an obligation to search for the equivalent for that species. This presentation will explore this idea of approximate equality for nonhuman animals and consider more generally the way that environmental entities have moved from “what” to “who” in the years since the publication of Law’s Relations. It will also address the way that Rights of Nature are mainstreaming Indigenous ideas of a living earth, ideas which Nedelsky was aware of and wrote about in her 2012 work and which she has engaged with directly in more recent work.
University of Alberta, Faculty of Law
Hadley Friedland is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. Her research focuses on Indigenous law, Aboriginal law, Family law and Child Welfare law, Criminal Justice, Therapeutic jurisprudence and Community-led research. Dr. Friedland helped establish the Indigenous Law Research Unit [ILRU] at the University of Victoria and was its first Research Director. She has had the honour of working with Indigenous communities across Canada to identify and articulate their own laws for over a decade. Dr. Friedland is Director of the Wahkohtowin Law and Governance Lodge, a dedicated research initiative developed to uphold Indigenous law through supporting community-led research. She is author of the book, The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization, University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Pedagogies of Generosity: Learning to Learn in a World of Relationships
This paper explores what kinds of learning and literacy is needed to more fully understand the implications of the truth claim that we live entirely interdependently, embedded in a world of relationships, with both humans and more-than-humans. It argues this vital literacy may be most effectively conveyed through human-to-human pedagogies of generosity. This question is explored through three methods of engaging with Indigenous laws: First, a community embedded land-based method, second, a language-based method, and finally, a narrative analysis method. Community teachings about how to teach a land-based course to law students demonstrate the crucial role and effectiveness of generosity and hospitality for learning. The Cree concept of manacihtawin expresses foundational guidance of the ideals for reciprocal care and respect in all relationships. Finally, in Cree, and other, Indigenous legal traditions, there is often a long history of stories where acts of kindness, generosity and hospitality lead to astonishing resolutions of almost every kind of human problem imaginable, from grief and loss, to theft, conflict, and even war between peoples. It concludes by wondering if experiencing, and practising, such human acts of generosity and hospitality, are foundational to understanding how all flourishing can be reciprocal, as opposed to competitive or transactional.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Sonia Lawrence joined Osgoode’s faculty in 2001. She graduated from the University of Toronto’s joint LLB/MSW program, went on to serve as law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada, and pursued graduate work at Yale Law School. Her work centers on critical analyses of legal conception of equality.
Sonia has served in a number of administrative roles at Osgoode including Assistant Dean of First Year and Director of the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies. Her current teaching includes a first year public and constitutional law, a seminar in critical race theory, and serving as the academic director/instructor for Feminist Advocacy, a clinical legal education opportunity offered in partnership with the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto. In the past she has served as the academic director for Osgoode’s Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (offered in partnership with the Human Rights Legal Support Centre (Ontario), and taught seminars in gender equality, graduate research and research methods, among others. Sonia recently complete two terms as the President of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers / Association Canadienne des Professeurs de Droit.
Western University
Tee Malleson is an Associate Professor in the Social Justice and Peace Studies Department at King’s University College at Western University.
Their research interests are interdisciplinary, crisscrossing contemporary political theory, feminist theory, political economy, philosophy, and sociology. One strand of research revolves around the study of Real Utopias, which are institutions designed to be both normatively emancipatory and empirically grounded. Their interests in this area include economic democracy, workplace democracy, basic income, citizens’ assemblies, wealth taxes, universal caregiving, good quality part-time work, and so on. Another strand of research focuses on contemporary debates over distributive justice, with interest in questions of egalitarianism, economic desert, autonomy, time sovereignty, and the culture of consumerism.
University of Ottawa Faculty of Law
Sophie Nunnelley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Common Law Section. She writes about health and mental health law and policy, focusing on issues relating to legal capacity and decision-making, human rights, and the governance of health-related artificial intelligence. She is a former AMS Fellow in Compassion and Artificial Intelligence, and is part of several interdisciplinary research teams examining the regulation of AI, health, and disability. Nunnelley received her SJD from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Nedelsky, supported by a Vanier Canada Scholarship. She received her LL.M. from Yale University as a Fulbright Scholar. She also practiced law for roughly a decade, including with the Constitutional Law Branch of the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General under the McGuinty government. Nunnelley has also argued cases before every level of court including the Supreme court of Canada, and was a law clerk for the Hon. Mr. Justice Gonthier at the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Relational Dimensions of Health AI Regulation
This paper argues that relational theory offers a valuable framework for thinking about AI and its regulation, using AI-powered chatbots as a case study. Chatbots are relational by design; general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT are notoriously sycophantic, telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need to know. Purpose-built mental health chatbots offer therapies and support, with researchers claiming some chatbots can foster a therapeutic alliance akin to the one between client and therapist. These are not incidental effects; they are design choices with profound implications for how people understand themselves, relate to others, and access care. This paper argues that our regulatory frameworks have not kept pace with this relational reality, instead treating AI chatbots as discrete, static objects. The paper argues that attending to the relational dimensions of AI in general, and AI chatbots in particular, reframes the inquiry in a helpful way. It asks not just whether chatbots are safe or effective as products, but whether the relationships they foster or undermine, and the values they embed, are the ones we want to be prioritizing as a society.
Dept. of Social Science, York University
Iván Darío Vargas-Roncancio, Ph.D Natural Resources Sciences (McGill University), acted as associate director for the Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives and held a post-doctoral position with the Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) program.
His research focuses on Earth law and the rights of nature; Indigenous legal cosmologies in Amazonia; anthropology of plant-human relations, and critical pedagogies.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Professor Ryder joined Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty in 1987. His research and publications focus on a range of contemporary constitutional issues, including those related to federalism, equality rights, freedom of expression, Aboriginal rights, and Quebec secession. He has also published articles that explore the historical evolution of constitutional principles and is currently researching the history of book censorship in Canada.
Western Law School
David Sandomierski joined Western Law in 2018. He strives to enhance the capacity of legal education to cultivate versatile professionals and critical, engaged citizens. In pursuit of this mission, David integrates diverse scholarly interests in Contracts, comparative legal thought, legal history, and the empirical study of legal education and the legal profession.https://www.youtube.com/embed/zEn0f2QQJgU?enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Flaw.uwo.ca
David earned his SJD from the University of Toronto, where his doctoral dissertation received the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal. David has received the Peter Oliver Prize from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and has twice been awarded the Canadian Association of Law Teachers’ Prize for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
David studied common and civil law at McGill University, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Law Journal. In 2008-09, David served as law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin at the Supreme Court of Canada. He was called to the Bar of Ontario in 2009. David is a former Vanier Scholar, Loran Scholar, and Parliamentary Intern.
Effective July 1, 2022, David is a Teaching Fellow with Western’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. Within the Faculty of Law, he directs the Legal Education Seminar Series.
Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Professor Scott’s teaching and research have been primarily in the fields of public international law and private international law, with a focus on the place of international human rights law in both of these fields. His most recent work draws on all three of these fields, including in the areas of human rights torts across borders, transnational corporate accountability and transitional justice. He has also written on constitutional rights protection in Canada and abroad. Much of his work has been on the theory and doctrine of economic, social and cultural rights. His work and teaching is strongly influenced by his interests in legal theory and in policy responses to globalization. He is series editor of Hart Monographs in Transnational and International Law, and is Founding Editor of Transnational Legal Theory.
Professor Scott has sought to create productive linkages between his academic work and various external commitments, particularly engagement with civil society. On the Canadian scene, he was one of the drafters of the Alternative Social Charter put forward during the Charlottetown constitutional round. He has been closely involved in advising equality-seeking, notably anti-poverty, groups on Canadian Charter of Rights litigation and on preparing interventions before various UN human rights bodies on Canada’s record of treaty compliance. He has been involved in appeals or interventions in the Supreme Court of Canada in major cases which have dealt with the interface of international law and Canadian law (Pushpanathan, Reference re Secession of Quebec, Baker). He advised in the formulation of the statement of claim in the civil lawsuit of Maher Arar against the Government of Canada and provided an expert report on Arar’s travel security during the settlement process.
Professor Scott was closely involved in the development of key aspects of the current South African constitution, beginning with his role advising the African National Congress on these matters while the ANC was still in exile. In 1993-1994, he served as co-counsel for the government of Bosnia in a case before the International Court of Justice, with responsibility for developing arguments on the limits of the powers of the UN Security Council. He has given academic opinions on international law to various governments and international organizations on issues related to such matters as the law of the sea, territorial claims and adjudicative procedures; he has also given opinions to non-governmental organizations and aboriginal government representatives on matters ranging from the legality of economic sanctions on Iraq to inland fisheries jurisdiction to transfer of environmental technology to counter global climate change. More recently, he was heavily involved with the London-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice and with the civil-society truth commission in Honduras known as the Comisión de Verdad, on which he served as a Commissioner.
Professor Scott was a member of the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, from 1989 to 2001. He joined Osgoode Hall Law School in 2000 following a term as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2001 to 2004, he was Osgoode’s inaugural Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies). During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was an Ikerbasque Fellow with the Basque Government’s Foundation for Science, based in Bilbao at the Universidad de Deusto. He was Director of the Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security from 2006 until the end of 2011. He served in 2020-21 as the Graduate Program Director for Osgoode’s PhD and research-stream LLM programs.
University of Minnesota
Joan C. Tronto is professor emerita of political science at the City University of New York and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of many works on care ethics, including over 50 articles and several books, including Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Routledge, 1993) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice (NYU Press, 2013). In 2023 she received the Lippincott Award for outstanding work in political theory from the American Political Science Association. She served as a Fulbright Fellow in Italy and has been awarded two honorary doctorates from the University for Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands and Louvain University in Belgium. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Care as a Human Right: A Democratic, Relational Construction
Some scholars and political actors have begun to suggest that care is a human right. This paper will explore how thinking of care as a human right has both promise and danger, lest it become a justification for authoritarian modes of care. The analysis will follow the four steps for formulating a right relationally proposed by Nedelsky in Law’s Relations (p. 236). A key step in this formulation is recognizing the values upon which a right rests. A right to care can become disastrous, a form of authoritarian care, unless the value of democratic equality is a core value of a right to care. The paper will accomplish two ends: first, it will offer a framing of care as a human right, and second, it will consider how what seem to be the inherently hierarchical relations of care can become a basis for a deeper appreciation of equality in society.
University of Victoria
Estair Van Wagner is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria where she researches and teaches in the areas of Property Law, Natural Resource Law, and Indigenous law. Her work explores who property relations structure human relations with the living world.
More-than-ownership for the more-than-human world
My paper would explore the profound impact of Professor Nedelsky’s relational rights framework on property relations, particularly the structure of land use relations in Anglo-Canadian law. It will imagine an expanded web of property relations that accounts for the obligations and duties shared between the human and more-than-human world, one that brings so-called ‘non-ownership’ to the fore through examples from Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand.
University of Cambridge, History and Philosophy of Science
Dr. Tvrtko Vrdoljak is a political theorist and a philosopher of social science. He completed a Ph.D. in Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University in 2023, where his dissertation, "The Metaphysics of Politics: Nietzsche and His Interlocutors," examined the metaphysical assumptions underlying dominant Western conceptions of politics and explored alternative frameworks beyond the axioms of logocentrism and anthropocentrism. From 2023 to 2024, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Political Ecology in Zagreb, Croatia, contributing to the Horizon-funded project "Towards a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy" and the NextGenerationEU-funded project "Ethics and Social Challenges." Tvrtko is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Cambridge, where his dissertation, "But Who, 'We'? Essays on More-than-Human Social Inquiry", investigates the paradigm shift emerging across the social sciences as scholars rethink the category of "the social" beyond intra-human relations.
Politicizing Causal Selection in Social Inquiry: More-than-Human Approach
Given the overwhelming number of causal factors leading to any event, explanations routinely struggle to distinguish between causes and conditions. This paper examines social explanation, where such distinctions are often shaped by sociocentrism, understood as an explanatory orientation that treats inter-human dynamics as the default locus of causation while relegating nonhuman processes to the background. Drawing on abnormality-based accounts of causal selection (Hart and Honoré), I argue that sociocentrism functions as a mechanism for fixing standards of normality upstream of inquiry. When this occurs, causal selection can systematically misfire, failing to register causally decisive deviations that fall outside a pre-defined social domain. I develop this claim through a reconstruction of more-than-human explanation in history, using Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome as a case study. Harper’s account reclassifies climatic volatility and pandemic disease from background conditions to abnormal shocks that made a decisive difference to social and institutional outcomes. I argue that this shift is best understood as a revision of inherited baselines governing causal selection, enabled by triangulation across heterogeneous forms of evidence. The broader upshot concerns social explanation more generally: discipline-based assumptions about normal functioning shape causal judgment in ways that can obscure nonhuman difference-makers.