Chet Mitchell Memorial Lecture Series

March 15, 2024 – Adelle Blackett – A Discussion on the Employment Equity Act Review Task Force Report

Dr. Adelle Blackett, FRSC, Ad E, is a Professor of Law at McGill University and the Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law. She has earned renown for building a decolonial approach to labour law, including in its interface with trade law and slavery and the law. Her 2019 book manuscript entitled “Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law” (Cornell University Press) garnered the Canadian Council on International Law’s (CCIL) 2020 Scholarly Book Award. Her current SSHRC-funded research challenging the metaphorical uses of slavery supports her general rapporteurship for the International Academy of Comparative Law, in which she is an elected Associate Member. Actively involved in law reform internationally and in Canada, from 2021 – 2023, she chaired the Employment Equity Act Review Task Force authored the recently released report that will be discussed in the lecture.

Registration is required, and can be done so here. Brunch will be provided for attendees

March 20, 2023 – Michael Gottheil – A Conversation about Legal Obligations and Disability Justice

Michael Gottheil is Canada’s first Accessibility Commissioner, appointed under the Accessible Canada Act.

Mr. Gottheil brings many years of leadership experience in the Administrative Justice sector, having previously served as Chief of Commission and Tribunals of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, Chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and Executive Chair of both the Environment and Land Tribunals Ontario and the Social Justice Tribunals Ontario. A graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School, he also practiced labour, employment and human rights law for close to 20 years. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and seminars, and has written widely on human rights, accessibility and inclusion, administrative law, institutional design and alternative models of dispute resolution.

Mr. Gottheil is committed to fostering collaboration between government, the private sector, community organizations and across civil society more broadly. Mr. Gottheil understands that we all have both legal and civic responsibilities, as well as a moral obligation to make justice accessible and meaningful for those who need it most. As a person with a disability, Mr. Gottheil has always been open to sharing his experiences, and to be inquisitive about other’s differences, challenges and insights. He is a firm believer that by listening and hearing diverse perspectives, we all grow stronger, individually and as a community.

Registration is required.

November 3, 2021 – Dr. Debra Thompson – Homegoing: On Blackness, Borders, and Belonging

Through an intimate exploration of the roots of Black identities in North America and the routes taken by we who have crisscrossed the world’s longest undefended border in search of freedom and belonging, this lecture journeys back and forth across the Canada/US border, and from coast to coast, combining memoir and analysis to highlight the tensions, contradictions, translations, and complications that anchor our varied understandings of race and racism. It seeks to trouble the idea that racial justice is possible within the confines of American democracy and reinvigorates the freedom dreams that have defined life in the African diaspora, emphasizing how the struggle for Black liberation has always defied national boundaries.

Dr. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. She is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race, with teaching and research interests that focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies. She is the author of The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (2016) and the forthcoming book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging in North America (Simon & Schuster, 2022).

Open to Carleton community members. Registration required.

African American music is deeply woven in the fabric of twenty-first century global culture. The rise of African American music reflects profound shifts in musical tastes in the United States and elsewhere since the late nineteenth century. As a hybrid music form that emerged at the intersection of varied cultural crossroads, African American music reflects various types of borrowing. African American culture has also more generally become a major source for borrowings in myriad contexts. Cultural hierarchies can impact perceptions of modes of acceptable borrowing. This lecture draws on conceptions about black music from varied disciplines, including law, music and folklore, focusing on how curation by varied actors at different points in time has contributed to societal conceptions and individual understandings of what African American culture should be and the development. This lecture will also discuss how the body of works that have come to be categorized as black music constitutes a malleable category that has changed with time, place, and circumstance.

This event is co-sponsored by the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Music), Carleton University.

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There is a widespread intellectual disenchantment with the idea of rights. Some analysts dismiss it on the grounds that the human rights movement is associated with western saviour politics, and implicated in neoliberal hegemony. Others argue that the idea of the rights-bearing individual is incompatible with indigenous notions of freedom in many parts of the world and must, therefore, be discarded. In the moment of the decolonial turn, rights are even denounced as part of ‘epistemic violence.’  Taking a historical approach, this lecture aims to remind critics of the investments of suppressed communities in rights as frames for a politics of resistance. The lecture draws on South African women’s struggles of the twentieth century to advance an argument for a more hopeful view of rights-based politics.

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The Honourable Sheilah L. Martin, Judge, Supreme Court of Canada.

The twin ruptures of Trump and Brexit in 2016 presented a challenge to scholars of neoliberalism. Were we witnessing a backlash or a frontlash against the dynamics of neoliberal globalism? Through the idea of “distressed neoliberalism,” this talk suggests two ways of answering these questions. The first focuses on the intellectual networks of neoliberalism connected to the Mont Pelerin Society. Here we see a neoliberalism distressed by the failures of the constitutional fixes of Maastricht and Geneva. Far-right neoliberals from Prague to London rediscovered the necessity of shared culture and even race, turning against supranational integration and immigration and opting for varieties of secession.  The second approach is not through ideology but the practice of corporate capitalism over the last forty years. Trump’s economic policy is shaped by his advisors who come from the world of distressed debt investment–also known as vulture capitalism–buying bankrupt and ailing companies to flip them for short-term gain, feeding what one could see as bankruptcy as a style of politics. Perhaps we best understand the present as a move ever further from fairy tales about the “magic of the market” and toward an ever more frank admission that the state and laws are intended, above all, for the enrichment of the few against the many.

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Housing is at the centre of an historic structural transformation in global investment with profound consequences for human rights. Unprecedented amounts of global capital are now being parked in housing or acquired as security for financial instruments that are traded on global markets. Homeownership and rental have been rendered unaffordable for low or moderate income households in many cities, effectively displacing people out of their homes, communities and cities. Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid to the need for enhanced human rights accountability and remedies in relation to the activities of corporate investors in housing.

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When homesteaders entered Oregon’s Wallowa Valley in the spring of 1872, a young Nez Perce leader known as Joseph took it upon himself to convince the federal government that it had made a mistake in opening up for settlement his band’s traditional territory.  It was the beginning of decades of advocacy that established Joseph as one of the great dissenters in the post-Reconstruction United States and an inspiration for twentieth-century civil and human rights activists.  While his substantive message about liberty, equality, and sovereignty has long been celebrated, his method of gaining an audience and attracting allies at the highest levels of authority is often overlooked. Thousands of miles from the capital, with the state nowhere to be seen, Joseph set out in search of American power.  What he found was an early incarnation of the modern administrative state, a dynamic way of governing that stretched U.S. policies to the far corners of the continent.  Over the course of decades, in peace and in war, Joseph developed insights that remain essential for today’s advocates who try to speak to the state and be heard.

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This lecture takes a position in a current debate about how to conceptualize the relationship between human rights and neoliberal globalization. The timing of the two phenomena — one in ethics and one in economics — has coincided, both rising since a 1970s breakthrough. But debate rages about whether to see human rights as the best tools to oppose their neoliberal Doppelgänger or to regard the new law and movements around rights — including economic and social rights — as part of the problem. This talk rejects both extreme positions in order to seek a different alternative. Of course human rights are a product of their time, but this hardly means they are easy to dismiss. However, as a set of ethical propositions and a set of practices, human rights are not what we need to confront economic injustice.

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In European accounts of international law, the history of the sea as a juridical space of the international commonly begins with Hugo Grotius’s, Mare Liberum (1609). This talk, which draws from Prof. Mawani’s book, ‘Across Oceans of Law’, presents a counter legal history of the sea. Specifically, it situates the freedom of the sea in the oceanic movements and imaginaries of subaltern travelers who, as legal subjects, produced their own juridical conceptions of maritime space, ones that often undermined the land/sea divide that proved so crucial to Grotius and to the legal history of the sea that has since followed.

This event is co-sponsored by: the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Faculty of Public Affairs, School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies – Human Rights

Dr. Marianne Constable discusses “Chicago Husband-Killing and the New Unwritten Law,” a study in history, law, and rhetoric that explores the cases of the 250+ women who killed their partners in Chicago between 1867 and 1931. Even before women were allowed on juries and contrary to much received wisdom, all-male coroner’s juries, grand juries and petit juries of the period exonerated most wives who killed their husbands, according to what newspapers dubbed “the new unwritten law.”

About the Speaker

Dr. Marianne Constable is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California (Berkeley). She is author of The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (winner of the Law & Society Association J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History); Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law; and Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (finalist for two Socio-Legal Studies Association book prizes).

This event is co-sponsored by the Canadian Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics and the Department of Philosophy.

How do U.S. prosecutors present the sex offender as a subject of punishment, rehabilitation and discipline during sentencing arguments? This talk analyzes the rhetorical strategy of characterizing sex offenders as non-human animals, problematizing how these utterances intersect with racializing discourses around black male sexuality.

Dr. Sameena Mulla is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Marquette University. Her book, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses and Sexual Assault Interventions (2014), is published by New York University Press. In 2013, she received Marquette University’s Way Klingler Young Scholar Award for excellence in research. Her current collaborative research project examines cultural narratives and expertise within U.S. sexual assault adjudication, and is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science Program.

Special guest speaker, Dr. Audra Simpson, examined the geopolitical logic of settler colonialism and Indigenous (women’s) death that underwrites the incredulity and skepticism that met (Chief) Theresa Spence’s hunger strike in December and January 2012-13. She argued that the structure of settler colonialism in Canada showed its public face in blog posts, editorial commentary and popular discourse (not to mention formal politics) when Spence’s strategic life in the face of a stated and willed death, continued on — as hers was a life that was already predisposed to death.

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Combining a radical revision of the historical formation of occidental law with perspectives derived from decolonial thought, this lecture offers a deconstruction of occidental law. This is an occidental law seen not, or not so much, in its colonial manifestation. It is the law extant within the Occident itself. Although occidental law is in this way shown to be comprehensively imperial in orientation, that same deconstruction reveals resistant dimensions intrinsic to law.

Peter Fitzpatrick is currently Anniversary Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and Honorary Professor of Law in the University of Kent. He has taught at universities in Europe, North America and Papua New Guinea and published many books on legal philosophy, law and social theory, law and racism, and imperialism, the latest ones being Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperialism, Legalism (Ashgate, 2008) and, with Ben Golder, Foucault’s Law (Routledge, 2009). Outside the academy he has been in an international legal practice and was also in the Prime Minister’s Office in Papua New Guinea for several years.

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Wendy Chan, Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University, presents an examination of the growing trend towards crimmigration in Canada – the intertwining of immigration law with criminal law. Drawing on recent policy reforms, such as Bill C-43, as examples of this trend, Chan argues that the contemporary treatment of ‘undesirable’ non-citizens is rooted in a politics of exclusion and inequality of treatment spurred on by growing suspicions and resentment towards immigrants and refugees. View the Poster!

Mark Neocleous is currently writing a work of counter-strategic thinking, the main focus of which is the global civil war of capital. Mark is on the Editorial Collective of Radical Philosophy and Red Quill Books.

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Peer Zumbansen is Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He is the founding director of the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society and Editor in Chief of the quarterly journal ‘Transnational Legal Theory’.

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Ngaire Naffine is a Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide in Australia and works in the areas of criminology, criminal law, jurisprudence, feminist legal theory and medical law.

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Dayna Nadine Scott is a visiting professor at Carleton University and an associate professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

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Davina Cooper  is a Professor of Law & Political Theory at the University of Kent (UK).

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Nathalie DesRosiers,  General Counsel, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, discussed examples of multi layered impacts of legal interventions.

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Dr. Anne Quéma, Acadia University, discussed family law in England.

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Dr. L. Jane McMillan is a legal anthropologist with a specialization in Indigenous law from St. Francis Xavier Univeristy.