Four faculty appointments in 2010

Joining the Law Faculty this year are Professor Leslie Green of the University of Oxford; Professor Will Kymlicka, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queens University; Christopher Essert, a J.S.D. candidate at Yale University; and Jennifer Quaid, a Ph.D. in Law candidate at Queen’s. Both Green and Kymlicka are Queen’s alumni – Artsci '78 and '84, respectively.

According to Dean Bill Flanagan, “By adding Professors Green, Kymlicka and Essert to our already exceptional faculty group working in various areas of legal theory, Queen's has become a leading centre for research in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law. Appointing Jennifer Quaid as our first Teaching Fellow in Business Law enhances our curriculum and helps us achieve our goal of providing our Ph.D. students with valuable teaching opportunities.”

Professor Leslie Green of Oxford, one of the leading legal theorists in the English-speaking world, joins Queen’s Law on a part-time appointment as Professor of Law and Distinguished University Fellow in the Philosophy of Law. He will maintain his ongoing appointment at Oxford, where he is Professor of the Philosophy of Law and a Fellow of Balliol College.

During September and October and for at least one shorter period each year, he will participate in the intellectual life of the Faculty while in residence at Queen’s Law. He will teach the seminar course Legality and the Rule of Law in the fall term and contribute to the graduate program, the establishment of further links with Oxford for students and faculty, and plan new programs at the Bader International Study Centre.

Green graduated as a Gold Medallist at Queen’s and holds an M.A., M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford. He began his teaching career at Oxford’s Lincoln College and then moved to Osgoode Hall Law School. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Texas, and a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Law and Philosophy. At the New York University School of Law, he is a member of the Hauser Global Faculty.

Widely published, Green writes and teaches in the areas of jurisprudence, moral and political philosophy and constitutional theory. He co-edits Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law and the monograph series Oxford Library of Legal Philosophy.

Professor Will Kymlicka, a Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, joins Queen’s Law on a cross-appointment from Queen’s Philosophy Department. Since 2007 he has taught International Norms of Minority Rights and supervised some graduate students at the Law Faculty. He will continue to teach the course in 2010-11, contributing to the Faculty’s strength in legal theory.

After receiving an undergraduate degree in philosophy and politics at Queen's, he went on to Oxford to complete a D.Phil. The author of six books published by Oxford University Press, with translations into 32 languages, he is also the editor of several books in his area of expertise. He is a recurrent visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a past president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.

“The students and faculty at Queen's Law are terrific, and I appreciate the perspective they bring to issues of political theory and international justice,” Kymlicka says. “I'm delighted to be joining the Faculty on a more permanent basis.”

 

Christopher Essert joins Queen’s Law as an assistant professor in July, while still a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where he formerly completed an LL.M. His thesis concerns the nature of legal obligations. He holds a B.A. from McGill University and was a Silver Medallist J.D. graduate from the University of Toronto. He was formerly a law clerk to Justice Michel Bastarache of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) and Visiting Doctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics.

Essert co-authored The Law of Bilingual Interpretation, a textbook on the interpretation of bilingual legislation in Canada and elsewhere that has been cited multiple times by the SCC. He has written articles published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence and the Osgoode Hall Law Journal. With a research interest primarily in legal philosophy, his current work centres on questions about the nature of legal obligations and of law more generally, as well as on the implications of such questions for theories of tort and property law. He will teach Property and Jurisprudence in 2010-11.

“Queen's Law faculty and students strike me as genuinely interested in the law -- for its own sake, to improve legal practice, and to help make Canadian society better, fairer, and more just,” Essert says. “This is the mark of a truly great law school, and I am honoured to be here.”

Jennifer Quaid, a Ph.D. candidate with an SSHRC doctoral scholarship in Law, has been appointed a Teaching Fellow in Business Law for 2010-11 and will teach Business Associations. Her thesis aims to develop a coherent theoretical rationale to underpin the assessment of corporate criminal liability on an organizational basis, taking into account how organizations operate and behave, rather than by reference to physical persons, as is the current approach in Canada.

She received three degrees from the University of Ottawa -- B.A. in Economics, LL.L in Civil Law, and LL.B. in Common Law -- and LL.M. degrees at both the University of Cambridge and Columbia University, the latter with an Associate-in-Law fellowship. A member of the Bars of Quebec, Ontario and New York, she has practised in the Competition Law Division of the Canadian Department of Justice and in the New York and Melbourne offices of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. She has also served as law clerk to SCC Justice Frank Iacobucci and in a senior academic administration role at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.

“When I was at law school, taking corporate law was a revelation;  I never imagined it could raise so many challenging legal issues that transcend the commercial context,” Quaid says. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to introduce a new crop of students to this fascinating and important area of law.”