“LSA is a huge conference – one of the biggest legal academic conferences in the world – and brings together an incredibly diverse group of scholars from law, the social sciences and the humanities, as well as practitioners,” says Joshua Karton, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Queen’s Law. “If there’s a takeaway from such a vast enterprise, it’s that socio-legal research is in robust health as a field, with international scope and multidisciplinary variety.”
Because of its size and diversity, the LSA annual meeting offers researchers several advantages.
First, it is almost uniquely valuable for meeting like-minded researchers. “Every presenter is able to find a dedicated, passionate specialist audience for their work – people who focus on the same issues, use the same methods, have the same social concerns and goals, and so on,” says Karton.
LSA also provides participants with an unparalleled opportunity for informal discussions across disciplines and theoretical traditions as well as more traditional formal exchanges. The substantial level of international participation also facilitates cross-national research connections and expanded research perspectives.
In addition, says Karton, “There’s a huge number of theme-based ‘Collaborative Research Networks,’ which have in-person meetings at the conference and maintain communication networks throughout the year.”
This year’s conference was held June 7-10 at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto, where 13 Queen’s Law community members shared their research. Faculty presenting included Sharry Aiken, Bita Amani, Joshua Karton, Lisa Kelly, Lisa Kerr, Kathy Lahey and Patti Peppin. Graduate student presenters included Basil Alexander, Kuukuwa Andam, Debra Haak and Michele Leering. PhD alumni Manoj Dias-Abey and Adelina Iftene also participated.
“Queen’s had a huge presence at the conference,” says Karton, commenting on how that shows the breadth of Queen’s scholars’ involvement in research with direct social impacts. “It was really gratifying for me to see such large numbers of faculty, postdocs and grad students presenting papers and organizing panels.”
Professor Sharry Aiken, an expert in immigration and refugee law, participated in a panel discussing the praxis of immigrants’ rights organizing today through dialogue between local activists and scholar advocates.
Professor Bita Amani presented a paper entitled “Eat This!: Gender Inequality, Culture, and the Politics of Food” on the International Law and Gendered Inequalities panel. This work sought to show how food practices and policies are not amoral but interpretive, and therefore demand critical reflection to complement the public consultative work of the federal government. An intersectional feminist lens informs this work and is instructive for framing national policy debates as Canada moves toward the articulation of a national food policy and seeks to advance gender equality and women's empowerment as one of the five themes for its G7 presidency.
Associate Dean Karton spoke on “The Persistence of Culture? ‘Chinese-Style’ International Commercial Arbitration in a World of Globalized Legal Practice.” Despite being a niche topic, his panel still managed to have an audience of about 20, and there was a lively Q&A/discussion session at the end, with informed and helpful questions and comments.
Professor Lisa Kelly was involved in three discussions: “We Don't Need No (Legal) Education? Foundational Questions for the Future of a Discipline,” “Intersectionality CRN,” and “The Work of Discretion in Policing, Prosecution, and Sentencing.”
The first was a panel that brought together a series of researchers and participants from a wide range of sites of legal education to stimulate a conversation about foundational questions. What is the purpose of legal education, and how does this purpose differ across different venues and modes? Given these various ends, what means for improving and attaining these ends are most appropriate?
The second was on women’s equality as a foundational principle in feminist legal theory. This cross-jurisdictional conversation concerned the gap between the promise of the law to ensure equality, and its application. It also examined the role that culture plays in narrowing or broadening that gap. Subtopics included: women’s representation in public office in Italy; female genital mutilation in Nigeria; women in the legal profession in Chile and Spain; and the gendered bathroom debate in the U.S.
Kelly’s third presentation was in collaboration with Professor Lisa Kerr, and discussed the role of discretion in the criminal justice system in Canada and the U.S. They drew on comparative perspectives, to consider both the repressive and emancipatory potential of discretion in reforming or resisting the criminal law power of the state.
Professor Kathleen Lahey and her co-coordinator of the Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network #38 (International SocioLegal Feminisms), organized the panel International Law and Gendered Inequalities, which featured legal scholarship focusing on questions and contradictions that emerge when international human rights laws are invoked to address gendered inequalities at the national level. Empirical accounts exploring the domestic impact of human rights-based approaches illustrated how international law interacts with and exacerbates the intricacies of domestic laws that perpetuate gender discrimination. Papers were presented by leading scholars from Brazil, Ireland, Canada, and Sudan. Professor Lahey’s paper, “Gender and Taxation in Developing Countries: The Roles of CEDAW, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, and the SDGs,”' presents comparative legal and statistical findings demonstrating the impact of developing country tax and expenditure policies on gender inequalities, poverty, and income inequalities.
Professor Patricia Peppin presented on her paper entitled “The Duty to Refer for Medically Assisted Dying: Conscientious Objection in Context.” As the name suggests, the presentation discussed the duty to refer, as part of the common law duty owed by health professionals to patients, substituting an effective path to treatment when the professional can’t provide it. This debate has reached a new forum with Canada’s legalization of medical assistance in dying. Peppin argued that the duty to refer should not be overridden by the assertion of freedom of conscience or religion. Conscientious objections should not be viewed as freestanding rights standing in isolation. Viewing in context requires attention to patients’ right to health protected through international covenants, the power imbalance between doctors and patients, and fiduciary obligations owed by the dominant health practitioner to vulnerable patients.
PhD candidate Kuukuwa Andam’s presentation was entitled “'Behave like Women’: Lesbians, Bisexual and Queer Women in Ghana,” and discussed the abuse of rights of sexual minorities in the country. Andam argued that Ghanaian female sexual minorities battle the dual challenge of sexism, and homophobia, consequently enduring diverse forms of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. The following research questions were considered in her paper: What are the cultural, colonial, social and religious factors driving homophobia in Ghana? What types of discrimination do female sexual minorities in Ghana encounter? To what extent can local and international legal principles be used to address these injustices?
Debra Haak, PhD candidate, presented on a panel “Contesting Consent and Sexual Agency in Law and Society.” Her paper is entitled “Re(de)fining “Prostitution” and “Sex Work:” Attending to the Role of Consent in Constructing Problems and Imagining Legal Responses.” Haak argued that the word “prostitution” and the term “sex work” are not synonymous, and that attending to how they are defined and used in texts relevant to legal decision-makers has the potential to better identify what is known and not known about the experiences of those who exchange sexual acts for compensation, and whose interests and rights are and are not implicated when evaluating constitutionality.
Basil Alexander, a PhD candidate, presented “Canadian Cause Lawyering: Key Trends and Issues from an Empirical Investigation.” He explored the complex relationships between social change and various legal actors, including cause lawyers, legal organizations and social movements.
PhD candidate Michele Leering’s presentation, entitled “Exploring Action Research as an Enabler of Innovation in the Justice Sector: Tackling the Wicked Problem of Access to Justice,” observed innovative research in the access to justice field. That included novel scholarship on methods to meet the legal needs of both consumers and communities, as well as on the application of methodological approaches to the field.
Manoj Dias-Abey, PhD’16, a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace, co-ordinated a roundtable of academics and advocates to discuss the legal strategies adopted by farmworkers in Canada and the United States.
Adelina Iftene, LLM’11, PhD’15, an Assistant Professor of Law at the Schulich School of Law, presented on “Access to Early Release for Individuals with Dementia Incarcerated in Canada: Challenges and Consequences.”
“The chance to have an impact with our research is why we do what we do,” says Karton. “In order to have an impact, our research needs to find its way to people who are interested in it and can make use of it.”