Cecil A. Wright Memorial Lecture Archives
"Tort as Protector: Common Law in an Age of Regulations"
Wednesday, April 2, 2025 - 4:10 pm to 6:00 pm
Location: J140, Professor A.V. Dicey ClassroomCatherine M. Sharkey
Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy
New York University School of LawProfessor Sharkey is a leading authority on torts, products liability, artificial intelligence in federal administrative agencies, public nuisance, punitive damages, and federal preemption of state tort law. She is a Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a member of its Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence in Federal Agencies, author of Algorithmic Tools in Retrospective Review (2023) and co-author of Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies (2020). Sharkey is co-author of Cases and Materials on Torts (13th edition, 2024) and Business, Defamation, and Privacy Torts (1st ed., 2025), and co-editor of Foundations of Tort Law (2nd edition, 2009). She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser to the Restatement Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm and Restatement Third, Torts: Remedies projects.
2023 Cecil A. Wright Memorial Lecture
"The Past, Present, and Future of the Global Legal Order"
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Oona A. Hathaway
Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center
Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science
Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal ChallengesProfessor Oona Hathaway will begin examining the "Old World Order," when war was not only legal but the key way in which states enforced their legal rights. She will explain when and how the legal order transformed in the 20th century, when war for all but a very limited set of purposes was outlawed, spurring widespread changes in the broader international legal system. Finally, she will discuss the impact of the illegal war in Ukraine on the global legal order—and what impact it might have in the future.
Professor Oona A. Hathaway has been a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law for the Legal Adviser at the United States Department of State since 2005. In 2014-15, she took leave to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is the Director of the annual Yale Cyber Leadership Forum and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has published more than 40 law review articles, and The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (with Scott Shapiro, 2017). She is also Executive Editor of and regular author at Just Security, and she writes often for popular publications such as The Washington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.
Jedediah Purdy, Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke University
“Democracy and Trust”
Does a democratic renewal need political trust? Will movements for deepened democracy fail because citizens mistrust one another too much to rule together? Without trust, are we trapped seeking a democracy we cannot achieve?
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
Biography
A prolific scholar, Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. He is the author of Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening – and Our Best Hope and edited the Norton Library edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden 1854, alongside three of Thoreau's most influential political essays: "Civil Disobedience," "Slavery in Massachusetts," and "A Plea for Captain John Brown."
His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Nomos, and Ecology Law Quarterly, among others. He has published essays on topics ranging from Elena Ferrante’s novels and socialism to natural disasters and the Green New Deal in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal.
Purdy clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York City. A member of the New York State Bar, he is a contributing editor of The American Prospect and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He was active in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and was voluntarily arrested for civil disobedience in 2013.
Philip Pettit
L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University“The Elusive Sovereign”
Thursday, October 10th, 2019
4:10pm to 6:00pm
Jackman Law Building, Room, Room 140
78 Queen's ParkAbstract
Does a conception of the law like H.L.A.Hart’s allow us to postulate a sovereign in the legal regime? Is it consistent with thinking that there is one supreme authority over the law? Or does his decentered model of the polity make no room for the idea of sovereignty? Does that model rule out the possibility of a legal sovereign in the way in which the early theorists of sovereignty such as Bodin and Hobbes thought that the mixed-constitutional model of the state ruled it out? Surprisingly, it turns out that despite the arguments of those theorists, and despite Hart’s own misgivings, the idea of sovereignty can find a natural home within a mixed or decentered set of legal arrangements.
Biography
Philip Pettit is L.S.Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has worked in a range of areas, including ethical and political theory; the theory of collective and corporate agency; and the philosophy of mind. He has published a number of books in those areas, including over the last decade Made with Words (PUP 2008), Group Agency (with C.List, OUP 2011), Just Freedom (Norton 2014), The Robust Demands of the Good (OUP 2014), and The Birth of Ethics (OUP 2018). He gave the Tanner Lectures in Human Values in Berkeley in 2015 and the John Locke Lectures in Philosophy in Oxford 2019. Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan et al. Read more about Prof. Pettit.
Mark Tushnet
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Harvard Law School“Institutions for Protecting Constitutional Democracy: Some Conceptual Preliminaries”
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
4:10pm to 6:00pm
Jackman Law Building, Room J140
78 Queen's ParkBiography
Professor Tushnet, who graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies examining (skeptically) the practice of judicial review in the United States and around the world. He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and (currently) a long-term project on the history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s.
Read the article in the University of Toronto Law Journal based on the lecture
(Access may be restricted)Lucia Zedner
Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law, and member of the Centre for Criminology, University of OxfordCounterterrorism on Campus: A Threat to Academic Freedoms?
Monday, October 16, 2017
4:10pm to 6:00pm
Jackman Law Building, Room P120
78 Queen's ParkRead the article based on this lecture in the University of Toronto Law Journal
Abstract
The threat of terrorism and the risks of radicalization pervade modern life. Universities are no exception and the ‘poisoning of young minds’ is a matter of particular political concern. Nonetheless, the decision of the UK government to place universities, and other educational institutions, under the statutory ‘Prevent Duty’, requiring them ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’, has proven highly controversial. Seen one way, it turns professors into police and students into suspects. Seen another, it enables universities to fulfil their safeguarding responsibility to protect vulnerable young people from the influence of extremists. This lecture asks if the policing of speaker events on security grounds is legitimate or if it threatens the legally protected rights of academic freedom and freedom of speech? Does the obligation to counter terrorism on campus fulfil a democratic duty to uphold security or is it incompatible with the larger role of the university?
Biography
Lucia Zedner is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Professor of Criminal Justice in the Faculty of Law, and member of the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. She is also a Conjoint Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she is a regular visitor. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. Recent books include Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law (2013, OUP), co-edited with Andrew Ashworth and Patrick Tomlin and Preventive Justice (2014, OUP) with Andrew Ashworth and Changing Contours of Criminal Justice (2016, OUP), co-edited with Mary Bosworth and Carolyn Hoyle. Her research interests include criminal justice, criminal law, security and counter-terrorism.
Prof. Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton UniversityThe End of the End of History
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
4:10pm to 6:00pm
Jackman Law Building, Room J140
78 Queen's ParkRead the background article (PDF)
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama pronounced the “end of history” when it seemed that the world was moving toward a consensus on the establishment of liberal, democratic, constitutional governments. Twenty-five years later, the number of liberal constitutional democracies is steadily declining, as states increasingly reject constitutionalism in liberal form. Instead, backsliding states are developing a new set of legal tools to maintain the façade of democracy and constitutionalism, while hollowing out the liberal content. The lecture will examine Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela and Ecuador as models of the new illiberal constitutionalism. In each case, strongman leaders have been elected in (more or less) free and fair elections and then they pull up the ladder of succession after themselves, concentrating power in few hands, disabling the opposition, and removing the independence of any institution that could provide checks. They modify or replace constitutions while turning their new forms of constitutionalism into the production of “worst practices.” This lecture shows why liberal constitutionalists have been losing the battle for hearts and minds of angry publics and proposes the standard of “self-sustaining democracy” to spearhead the normative critique of these new regimes.
Biography
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Scheppele’s work focuses on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, Scheppele researched the effects of the international “war on terror” on constitutional protections around the world. Her many publications on both post-1989 constitutional transitions and on post-9/11 constitutional challenges have appeared in law reviews, social science journals and multiple languages. In the last two years, she has been a public commentator on the transformation of Hungary from a constitutional-democratic state to one that risks breaching constitutional principles of the European Union.
Professor Seana Shiffrin
Enhancing Moral Relationships through Strict Liability
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
4:00 - 6:00 pmSolarium
84 Queen's Park
Toronto, ON
Read the news article about the lecture
The lecture will discuss the relationship between strict liability in contract law and the moral idea that liability should be predicated upon fault. I offer a moral defense of the strict liability rule governing contractual performance but then go on to argue that this moral defense casts further doubt upon broad interpretations of the mitigation doctrine in contracts.
Biography
Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has taught since 1992. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, Oxford University, and the Harvard Law School. She teaches courses on moral and political philosophy as well as contracts, freedom of speech, constitutional rights and individual autonomy, remedies, and legal theory. She is an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research addresses issues in moral, political and legal philosophy, as well as matters of legal doctrine, that concern equality, autonomy and the social conditions for their realization. Her recent work has focused on freedom of speech, truth-telling, promising, contract, and the role of law in facilitating and fostering moral character.
Professor Robert W. Gordon
"Caesar” Wright’s Legacy: The Necessarily Uneasy Relation Between Legal Education and Legal Practice
Thursday, March 12, 2015
4:00 - 6:00 pmVictoria College, Room 101
91 Charles Street West
Toronto, ON
In 1957 C.A. (“Caesar”) Wright and his colleagues won the fight they had waged for decades to take control of educating lawyers from the benchers of the Law Society and to relocate it in university-based law schools staffed by full-time academics. The issues apparently settled in that fight have recently been reopened, as the downturn in the legal job market has caused many lawyers to question whether law schools adequately prepare their graduates for practice, and to urge the schools to do more vocational training and less academic research. These are valid concerns; and the schools should respond (as most are now doing) by paying more attention to practice, but in ways that preserve the schools’ distinctive missions to understand how the legal system works and to help the profession serve its ultimate goals of achieving justice and realizing the public purposes of law.
Biography
Professor Robert W. Gordon is a preeminent legal historian, with expertise in evidence, the legal profession, and law and globalization. He has written extensively on contract law, legal philosophy, and on the history and current ethics and practices of the organized bar. Professor Gordon is known for his key works, The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1992), and Storie Critiche del Diritto (Critical Legal Histories) (1995), and is editor of Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman.
Professor Gordon received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School. Before going to law school, he worked as a newspaper reporter and served in the U.S. Army. Following law school, he served in the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts (1971). Professor Gordon taught previously at Stanford Law School in 1983-1995, and most recently, he was the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School SUNY and the University of Wisconsin, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Toronto, and the European University Institute.
Professor Gordon has served on several American Bar Association and Connecticut Bar task forces on professional ethics and practice and on the Advisory Board of the Legal Profession Program of the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation). He also is a past president of the American Society for Legal History. His forthcoming publications include: Lawyers of the Republic; Taming the Past: Law in History and History in Law (essays on legal history and the uses of history in legal argument); and The American Legal Profession, 1870-2000.
Professor Gráinne de Búrca
Florence Ellinwood Allen Professor of Law,
New York University School of Law"The European Union: Messianic or Democratic?"
Monday, November 25, 2013
4:10 - 6:00 pmEmmanuel College Rm. 119
in Victoria University
75 Queen's Park Crescent
Toronto, ONThe past six years have been a period of economic and political crisis in Europe and the European Union has been forced to confront existential questions. In particular, what is the EU for, and is there a sufficient rationale for its continued existence? While these challenges suggest the need for a revitalized sense of mission, other influential observers argue that the EU’s messianic origins - the idea that it exists to serve some noble goal or ideal – lie at the heart of its problems. On this view, the EU is doomed unless it shifts the basis for its political legitimacy from messianism to democracy. This lecture challenges the argument that the EU should abandon messianism, or mission-legitimacy, and argues that mission legitimacy still plays an important role in justifying the existence of the EU and indicating a better future path.
Professor James Whitman
Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law, Yale Law School“Of Wars and Trials: Can a War be a Lawful Procedure for Claiming Rights?”
4:00 - 6:00 pm
Tuesday, November 13, 2012McCarthy Tétrault Classroom (A)
Flavelle House, 78 Queen's Park Cres.
Faculty of Law, University of TorontoThis year’s Wright Lecture was from James Whitman’s forthcoming book, The Verdict of Battle, published in late October 2012.
James Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. His subjects are comparative law, contracts, criminal law, and European legal history. His published books and articles include The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial; Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe; and The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty. Professor Whitman received a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale, an M.A. from Columbia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Professor Hanoch Dagan
Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law"Inside Property"
4:10 pm
Monday, February 13, 2012Cassels Brock and Blackwell Classroom (B)
Flavelle House, 78 Queen's Park Cres.
Faculty of Law, University of TorontoRead the article based on the lecture in the University of Toronto Law Journal
Professor Dagan will give a broad overview of the conception of property he has been developing over the last decade. The two main features that distinguish his conception of property from more conventional ones are his emphasis on the internal life of property (on property governance, as he calls it) and its insistence that inclusion – and not only exclusion – is, at times, part and parcel of what property is.
Prof. Hanoch Dagan is the former Dean of the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law (2006-2011) and the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies (2007-2011). He is also a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the American Law Institute and of the International Academy of Comparative Law. Prof. Dagan received an LL.M. and a J.S.D. from Yale Law School (where he held a Fulbright award) after receiving his LL.B. Summa Cum Laude from Tel Aviv University. Prior to becoming Dean he was the Director of the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. He was also a visiting professor and an Affiliated Overseas Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Prof. Dagan has published over forty articles in leading legal journals such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, California Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Texas Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, American Bankruptcy Law Journal, American Journal of Comparative Law, and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Prof. Dagan has also written four books: Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Law and Ethics of Restitution (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Property at a Crossroads (Ramot, 2005) (in Hebrew), and Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on two new books: Properties of Property (with Gregory S. Alexander) (Aspen, forthcoming 2012), and American Legal Realism Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013). During the Fall of 2011 Professor Dagan will be a Visiting Professor of Law and Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Senior Fellow at Yale Law School.
Professor Michel Troper, "Interpretation, Legal Science and Causality"
Professor Martti Koskenniemi
Professor of International Law and
Director, Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights,
University of Helsinki"Empire and International Law: The Spanish Contribution"
4:30-6:30 pm
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Flavelle House Classroom "C"
78 Queen's Park Cres.
Faculty of Law,
University of TorontoThe 2009-2010 Wright Lecture was published in issue 61:1 of the University of Toronto Law Journal
The Spanish Scholastics of the sixteenth century are generally known as the precursors of Hugo Grotius in the application of natural law and the law of nations (ius gentium) to the political relations of early modern states. Their writings on the American Indians have been read as especially significant for the formation of the humanist–colonialist legacy of (European) international law. I have no quarrel with these views. This essay will, however, claim that the principal legacy of the Salamanca scholars lay in their development of a vocabulary of private rights (of dominium) that enabled the universal ordering of international relations by recourse to private property, contract, and exchange. This vocabulary provided an efficient articulation for Europe's ‘informal empire’ over the rest of the world and is still operative as the legal foundation of global relations of power.
Martti Koskenniemi is an international lawyer and a professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. In 2008 - 2009 he held the seat of distinguished visiting Goodhart Professor at the Faculty of Law, Cambridge University. He has been Global Professor of Law in the New York University, and a member of the International Law Commission (2002-2006). He served in the Finnish Diplomatic Service in the years 1978-1996, lastly as director of the Division of International Law.
Professor A.W. Brian Simpson
Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School"Human Rights and the Relics of Empire"
4:00-6:00 pm
Monday, February 9th, 2009Flavelle House Classroom "C"
78 Queen's Park Cres.
Faculty of Law,
University of TorontoA. W. Brian Simpson’s primary interest is in the historical development of law and legal institutions. He is also an expert on the European Convention and on human rights and frequently speaks on these subjects in Europe and the United States. He does some pro bono consulting in connection with cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Simpson is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the Law School and has held professorships at the University of Kent, the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and the University of Ghana.
Professor Simpson earned an M.A. and a Doctorate of Civil Law from Oxford University. He is a fellow (honorary) of Lincoln College, Oxford, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. In June 2001, he became Honorary Queen’s Counsel. Simpson teaches Property, English Legal History, and The Boundaries of the Market at the Law School. His books include Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention; A History of the Common Law of Contract; A Biographical Dictionary of the Common Law; Cannibalism and the Common Law; A History of the Land, Law, Legal Theory and Legal History; In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain; and Leading Cases in the Common Law.
Professor Susanne Baer
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin5:00 pm
September 18, 2007McCarthy Tetrault Classroom
Flavelle House
78 Queen's Park Cres.
Faculty of Law,
University of Toronto"Dignity Liberty - Equality. Aspects of a European Constitutional Triangle"
Susanne Baer is a Professor of Public Law and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Law of Humboldt University in Berlin. She previously held visiting appointments in Bielefeld, Erfurt, Linz, at the Summer Course of the European University Institute in Fiesole, and is Visiting Faculty at CEU Budapest.
Her publications in German include a book on Dignity or Equality (Würde oder Gleichheit, Nomos 2005) on comparative antidiscrimination law, which has been awarded a prize by the city of Frankfurt/M., a study on doctrinal resonances of changing images of the state and The citizen in Administrative Law ("Der Bürger" im Verwaltungsrecht, Mohr Siebeck 2006), and several edited volumes on equality politics. She is co-author with Norman Dorsen, Michel Rosenfeld and Andras Sajo of Comparative Constitutionalism (West 2003).
She has served as Vice-President for Academic and International Affairs at Humboldt University and as Director of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (www.gender.hu-berlin.de); since 2003, she is the Director of the GenderCompetenceCentre, advising the German Federal Government (www.genderkompetenz.info). She is also member of expert groups for the European Commission, currently on equality in research, and is currently working on socio-cultural legal studies, comparative constitutionalism, and law against discrimination in the 21st century.
Professor Nicola Lacey
London School of Economics"From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
Women, Autonomy and Criminal Responsibility
in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England"March 8, 2007
5:00 pm
Bennett Lecture Hall
Flavelle House - Faculty of Law
78 Queen's ParkThe Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries are generally characterised as an era of slow but – at least from the latter part of the Eighteenth Century – steady progress in the English criminal justice system from an ‘ancien regime’ characterised by widespread discretion, unevenness and brutality, to a system based on principles of individual responsibility, uniformity and ideals of civilisation. It is less often noticed that this era of ‘modernisation’ also marked a steady decline in the proportion of women tried as defendants in criminal cases. Notwithstanding the late Victorians’ intense anxiety about female crime, the best available estimates suggest that whereas at the start of the Eighteenth Century, women constituted between one third and two fifths of felony defendants, this had dropped to about one tenth by the end of the Nineteenth Century. Drawing on images of women’s criminal responsibility in contemporary novels, the lecture will explore the relationship between the striking decline in female involvement in the English criminal process, changing ideas of women’s capacities and proper role in economy and society, and the development of legal conceptions of responsibility based on defendants’ capacities and subjective mental states.
Nicola Lacey is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the London School of Economics. She previously held appointments at New College, Oxford and at Birkbeck College, and has held visiting appointments at New York University, Yale University, the Australian National University, the Humboldt University and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Her most recent book, A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford University Press 2004) was awarded the Swiney Prize and was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. She works in the broad fields of criminal justice and legal and social theory, and is the author of State Punishment (Routledge 1988) and Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (Hart Publishing 1998), as well as co-author of The Politics of Community (with Elizabeth Frazer: Harvester Wheatsheaf/University of Toronto Press 1993) and Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Celia Wells and Oliver Quick: Third Edition, Cambridge University Press 2003).
She currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, and is working on a cross-disciplinary study of the development of ideas of responsibility for crime since the Eighteenth Century
Philip G. Alston
Professor of Law
Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
New York University School of Law"The UN's 'Reformed' Human Rights Regime: Three Challenges"
October 6, 2005
4:00 pm
Bennett Lecture Hall
Flavelle House - Faculty of Law
78 Queen's ParkPhilip Alston is Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. He is currently UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, as well as being Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights in relation to the Millennium Development Goals. For 2005-06 he is Chairperson of the Coordinating Committee of Human Rights Special Procedures of the UN Commission on Human Rights. He previously chaired the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights for eight years until 1998. He was UNICEF's legal adviser throughout the period of the drafting of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and was director of a major project commissioned by the European Commission, which resulted in the publication of a Human Rights Agenda for the European Union for the Year 2000 and led to major changes in EU human rights policy. Alston has been editor-in-chief of the European Journal of International Law since 1996.
Martha L. Minow
Harvard Law School
William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Law"Outsourcing Power: Private Police, Prisons, and War"
January 20, 2005
4:30 pm
Bennett Lecture HallProf. Robert E. Scott,
University of Virginia
"The Death of Contract Law"
March 2, 2004
As an area of research, contract theory has claimed three Nobel prizes in economics and attracted countless studies across a range of disciplines. This years Cecil Wright Lecturer, Professor Robert Scott of the University of Virginia, Faculty of Law, dedicated his talk to an exposition of the advances made in this area. Scott advocated a return to the classical common law approach to contract law, preferring a strict interpretation of the written contract to the contextual, reliance-based enquiry of modern times. Using examples from the United States, he cautioned against interference by courts in situations that are ill-suited to judicial intervention. The enforcement of some promises may appeal to our sense of justice and fairness but too much intervention by the courts comes at a cost, said Scott. He went on to point out that psychological experiments reveal that parties are less likely to deal fairly if there is the threat of legal enforcement; that is, fairness cannot be imposed from above. Scott concludes from this that contract law should interpret only the plain meaning of the written text and cautioned that efforts to judicialize standards of fair-dealing may be subversive. It would dampen the natural social forces which impel us towards cooperative reciprocity and it would destabilize existing transactions by attracting judicial intervention in cases where parties are better capable of self-enforcement. Scott concluded that whatever use they may have had to the Chancery, the doctrines of good faith or the standards of commercial reasonableness may have no place in a modern courtroom.
In 2002, the Cecil A. Wright Memorial Lecture was given by Prof. Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School, on the topic of "Human Rights in the Age of Terror".
In the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, many members of society have deemed September 11th the beginning of the age of terror.
The effects of this new era can be construed as immediate, with a seeming erosion of the foundational value of human rights. Appropriately, Human Rights in the Age of Terror was the selected topic for this years annual Cecil A. Wright Lecture, which featured a compelling speech by Prof. Harold Hongju Koh of Yale Law School.
Despite pressure to recede to a global landscape of protectionism and the imposition of unilateral morals, Prof. Koh argued for the sustained adherence to international human rights standards. The observance of human rights is a measure of the rectitude of our actions, Koh articulated.
In his concluding remarks, Prof. Koh argued strongly against the use of military tribunals and in favour of adjudication via the court system. Without such a separation of powers and adherence to due process, international treaties stand to be violated and the rule of law undermined, he concluded.