This fall sees a new course for upper-year students added to the Queen’s Law curriculum: the Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy. The Colloquium is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Law, the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Political Studies.

The Colloquium focuses on the areas of legal and political philosophy through a schedule of guest speakers who will join the students in the course every other week for a two-hour workshop. The preceding week, the students will meet with the Colloquium’s conveners, Professors Jean Thomas and Grégoire Webber, to review the speaker’s paper and prepare for the workshop.

Speakers include Kimberley Brownlee from Warwick University, Sherry Colb and Michael Dorf from Cornell University, Thomas Christiano from the University of Arizona, John Gardner and David Miller, both from Oxford University, and John Oberdiek from Rutgers University.

The workshops will be open events, and members of the Queen’s community are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion. Workshops are generally held every other Monday from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in room 211 of Sir John A. Macdonald Hall. The full schedule of workshop dates is available from the Colloquium webpage.

The goal of the Colloquium is to promote closer collaboration between legal, philosophical and political studies by bringing together students and faculty from these overlapping disciplines to engage in rigorous intellectual discussions. Thomas and Webber say that “the Colloquium offers students a rigorous opportunity critically to engage with some of the very best legal and political philosophers.”

To earn credit for the course, students will attend a seminar and write a short reaction paper in advance of each workshop, attend the workshop and write a final term paper. Law students and graduate students from Philosophy and Political Studies apply to the course to earn course credit through their respective departments.

This Colloquium is the flagship activity of the Program in Law, Ethics and Public Affairs and is made possible through funding from the Canada Research Chair in Public Law and Philosophy of Law.