8 BLawyerisH/March, 2017
By Shantelle LaFayette
Law schools need to facilitate and encourage dialogue around diversity and inclusion, not shy away from potentially heated topics such as race. Law professors should strive to incorporate critical analysis of cases like Gregson v Gilbert into their pedagogy and to include conversations about legal violence and systemic racism towards people of colour (both in the past and in present) within the context of their classes. Understanding the way slavery shaped the relationships between law, public policy and social realities is an important first step in fostering racial equality in society and eliminating institutionalized racism. Educating future jurists about issues of systemic discrimination and implicit bias should be a top priority for law schools as it is likely to drive positive changes within the legal profession, including cultural sensitivity and awareness.
By Baya Yantren
Like a great number of North American universities, McGill University is born from the conquest of land, the robbery of goods, and the enslavement of people. Given the history of James McGill's wealth accumulation, teaching slavery as a genesis of the liberal legal tradition at the McGill Faculty of Law can be a small act of ideological reparation. With slavery as one of “Canada’s best-kept secrets,” teaching and learning slavery could be used to mobilize the proceeds of slavery to uncover its ideological and material legacies, and a first step in disabling their long-lasting harms.
Teaching and learning slavery is also essential to engaging in thorough legal scholarship, particularly with McGill partaking in the tradition of legal liberalism and positioning itself at the forefront of “transsystemia”. Despite its claim to European traditions of legal scholarship as a Faculty, no course in legal history is offered as part of the BCL/LLB at McGill, with the history of both civil and common law relegated to quick introductions. Ignorance of histories of legal thought makes it particularly difficult to understand legal genealogies and to approach law critically. The links between Roman law, the Code Noir, and the Code de l’indigénat should not be specialist knowledge. Learning and teaching slavery and the law means delving into legal history, demystifying narratives of ‘original sin’ and eschewing presentism in order to understand the legal genealogies in which the institution of slavery plays a central role: property law, labour law, contract, international law, and public law among others. There is no stronger historical basis for transsystemic legal education than the legal history of slavery, the murderous institution that has built the world that today requires the “multilingual, multijurisdictional and multidisciplinary” jurists described by Professor Roderick McDonald.
*This piece was first published in Volume V of Contours, March 2017, McGill
Credit: Alex MacLeod - blogs.ubs.ca