Team
Members
Filipe is a professor at the Law Faculty of the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. A Brazilian, he holds a degree from the Collège Universitaire de Sciences Po, a master's degree in economic law and a doctorate in law from the same institution's law school. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2022, The Conquest of the Devil's Paradise: International Law, Frontier-Making and Capitalist Power, presented a history of international law in the expansion of capitalism in the Amazon during the rubber boom at the turn of the 19th century. His research focuses on the governance of natural resources, taking a critical and historical approach to exploring its links with international law, the idea of development and human rights. He teaches international law and international human rights law at undergraduate and master's level, and directs the human rights programme of the master's degree in law at the Universidad del Rosario. Before joining this institution, he was a lecturer at Sciences Po's Collège universitaire and at the University of Paris X-Nanterre in France, and a tutor for several years in the Human Rights, Economic Development and Globalisation programme at Sciences Po's Clinique de droit.
Adodé Bignon Jean-Pierre Ayena has been a candidate for a research-type master's degree at the Faculty of Law of the University of Sherbrooke, since the winter 2021 semester. Previously, he completed a master 1 in European studies at the Global Studies Institute ( GSI), then a master's degree in international and European law, at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His training in diplomacy and international relations and his background in human rights earned him a first professional immersion in the United Nations system in Geneva, as a multilateral cooperation assistant. Since then, Jean-Pierre AYENA has been interested, in the context of his research, in critical approaches in international law, in particular in Third world approaches to international law (TWAIL). Its perspective consists of questioning the intrinsic foundations of contemporary international law, in order to understand the reasons for the lack of recognition and protection of climate refugees by this law, in order to be able to propose ways of taking them into account. Jean-Pierre is a teaching and research assistant, then a member of the World University Service of Canada at the University of Sherbrooke.
A graduate of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and New York University (NYU), Olivier Barsalou is a professor in the Department of Legal Sciences at UQAM. His work on the history of international law has explored, from the perspective of US government archives, the emergence of UN regimes for the protection of human rights in the post-1945 world. His current research analyses the decisive role that international law has played, and continues to play, in the advent of what is now seen as the global waste crisis, whether in the form of CO2 or plastic. His most recent work on the subject (co-authored with his colleague Michael H. Picard) has been published in the Chinese Journal of International Law and in a collective work published by Edward Elgar in 2021.
After studying political science (B.A., UQAM, 1998), Rémi Bachand completed a master's degree (LL.M., UQAM, 2000) and a doctorate in international law (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2007). He then spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. He has taught at the Department of Legal Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal since 2008. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Internationales (Université Paris II: Panthéon-Assas), the Université Paris VIII (Vincennes-St-Denis) and the Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), as well as a visiting researcher at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia). He has also held the Henri Rolin Chair in International Law (Belgium) for 2019-2020.
Alexandra recieved her Bachelor of Law from the Université du Québec à Montréal in 2015. She is a member of the Barreau du Québec since 2017, following an internship for the litigations department of the City of Montreal. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Law at the Université de Sherbrooke. Her main interests include administrative law, governance law and theory of law. Her master's research project focused on the influences of the New public management reforms on the administration of the Tribunal Administratif du Travail. Alexandra also works as a research assistant and as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Sherbrooke.
Marie-Claude is professor at the Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke, since 2011. Her doctoral thesis, conducted jointly at Laval University and the Université de Bordeaux, was devoted to the analysis of fair trade certification from a legal perspective. Her doctoral research led her to study social and environmental standards in certified fair-trade vineyards in Chile, South Africa and Argentina. It focused primarily on private qualifications, corporate social and environmental responsibility, consumer law, international labour law as well as access to justice.
Lauren Cavallier is a doctoral candidate in law at the Université de Sherbrooke. She began her studies at the Université d'Avignon in France, where she obtained a bachelor's degree in law. She was then accepted into the research-based Master of Laws programme at the UdeS in 2019, where she wrote a dissertation on the legal interactions between the European and Aboriginal systems from the 17th to the 19th century. Now a doctoral student since winter 2022, her interests lie in adapting the justice system for Canada's First Nations and Inuit, accessibility to justice, community justice, Aboriginal governance, and the relationship between Aboriginals and Quebec's healthcare system. She won the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice's Charles D. Gonthier Fellowship for her research project on Aboriginal dignity in the Quebec healthcare system. She hopes to become a professor to raise awareness of the Aboriginal cause among students, and to play an active role in the process of recognising the rights of First Peoples.
Véronique is professor at the Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke. In 2015, she completed a Ph.D. in Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Taking the Law to the Streets: Legal and Spatial Tactics Deployed in Public Spaces to Control Protesters and the Homeless in Montreal, studied the mobilization of municipal law to control marginalized peoples in Montreal. Her ethnographic approach led her to work closely with both homeless people and protesters who had received statements of offense for their occupation of public space in Montreal. Her current research interests include the criminalization of marginalized peoples, penal control of public space and ethnographic methods in law.
Michaël Lessard is particularly interested in how private law deals with vulnerable or marginalised individuals, and uses critical approaches to reflect on these issues. His current work focuses on sexual and domestic violence, animals, multiple parenthood, medical aid in dying and the theoretical foundations of private law. He holds a double bachelor's degree in civil law and common law from McGill University and worked as a research lawyer at the Quebec Court of Appeal before pursuing a master's degree in legal theory at New York University and a doctorate in law at the University of Toronto. He has been a member of the Quebec Bar since 2016. Before joining the Université de Sherbrooke's Faculty of Law as a professor in 2023, Michaël Lessard completed a research residency at Cambridge University's Centre for Animal Rights Law. Michaël Lessard is interested in supervising students who wish to explore critical or comparative approaches to private law, the theoretical foundations of private law, family law, the law of persons or animal law.
Co-founder of the Laboratory and professor of Law at the Université de Sherbrooke, Hélène's research focuses on the issue of environmental protection in the Arctic in the context of climate change. Developing a critical approach to international law, she is interested in the limits and possibilities of using law to protect the Arctic environment, particularly with respect to oil and gas, maritime transport, the rights of indigenous peoples and biodiversity. She is also interested in developing critical theories of law, the relationship between law and politics, specifically the legitimacy of law, the rule of law and the reciprocal relationship that the state must maintain with its citizens.
Krissiamba is a jurist by training and worked in this capacity at the Commissariat for the protection of privacy (CIL) of Burkina. His research interests includes information and communication technology law, the legal and sociological dimensions of algorithmic data processing, digital human rights, critical theories of law, information sciences and communication. His doctoral thesis project focuses on the concept of personal data and its legal basis in the context of the digital economy. Krissiamba is a research and teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law of the University of Sherbrooke. He is also a regular member of the Laboratory for Critical Research in Law (LRCD).
Professor McKee began his academic training at Harvard University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and Social Anthropology. He continued his training in civil law and common law at McGill University. In 2006-2007, he worked at the Supreme Court of Canada as a law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. In 2013, he defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law on Canadian legislation and global governance in the areas of development aid, environmental assessment and the export of medicines. From 2012 to 2018, he was a professor of law at the Université de Sherbrooke, where he directed the common law and transnational law programs, among others. He has been a member of the Ontario Bar since 2007. During his doctoral studies, he received grants from the Ontario government, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the University of Toronto. At the Faculty of Law, he teaches mainly common law and administrative law courses.
Marie-Andrée Plante has been a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke's Faculty of Law since 2023. She teaches Foundations of Law, Property Law, and Legal Methodology and Writing. She is primarily interested in the construction and operation of categories of legal thought, and their resonance on the imaginary of law. She looks at the modes of thought and histories on which these categories are based, with a view to questioning their self-evident truths. Her current research focuses on how such a category - the 'victim' - manifests itself in contemporary Canadian legal discourse. She holds a double degree in civil law and common law from McGill University, a master's degree from Oxford University and a joint master's degree from École normale supérieure de Paris, EHESS and Université Paris Nanterre. She was a research lawyer at the Quebec Court of Appeal and assistant director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law before pursuing her doctoral studies at McGill University. She is interested in supervising students with an interest in legal philosophy or theory, as well as in methodological or theoretical sensibilities such as discourse analysis, feminist approaches to law, or law and literature. It is also open to the supervision of students whose work explores themes such as the concept of the victim in law, sexual and domestic violence, or animals.
Alexandra is a professor at the Faculty of Law, Université de Sherbrooke. Using critical and comparative perspectives, her work focuses on fundamental institutions of private law. A graduate of the Transsystemic Program of McGill University, she is also holds an LL.M. and an LL.D. from Laval University, as well as a B.A. in comparative literature and cinema from the University of Montreal. Member of the Barreau du Québec since 2009, she served as a law clerk at the Court of Appeal of Quebec (2008–2010) after having been the Assistant Director for the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law (2007–2008). Her work today focuses on the social functions of private law, more particularly on the notion of power and new ways of holding property.
Elkanah Babatunde is a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Sherbrooke's Faculty of Law and coordinator of the Laboratoire pour la recherche critique en droit. He holds a PhD in Public Law and a Masters of Human Rights Law, both from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He was a 2018/2019 recipient of the Yale-Fox Fellowship at Yale University, USA. Prior to joining academia, Elkanah practiced as a lawyer in a boutique law firm representing clients in a range of land use and environmental rights cases. Elkanah’s research interest is at the intersection of public international law, climate justice and human rights law. His current research project seeks to examine climate change mitigation as a global public good and the implication of these on intellectual property rights and the transfer of climate technology from developed state parties of the UNFCCC to their developing counterparts, especially African states. His work has been published in peer reviewed journals including the Cambridge Law Review, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence among others.
A lawyer by training, Field Itinerant Assistant at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from September 2015 to September 2016 and former intern at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D,C, Ansadou M. Cherenfant holds a bachelor's degree in law from the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences of the State University of Haiti. He holds a Master 1 in International Human Rights Law and Public Law from the Catholic University of Lyon, and a double Master 2 in History, Theory and Practice of Human Rights, specialization in conflict management, mediation and interculturality and in Common Law respectively at the Unesco Chair (Memories, Cultures and Interculturality) and at the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Lyon. Recipient of a scholarship of excellence from the J.A. De Sève Foundation, he is pursuing doctoral studies in law (2023-2027) at the Université de Sherbrooke's Faculty of Law under the supervision of Professor Hélène Mayrand. His research focuses on the effectiveness of human rights protection in the context of migration: the case of Haitian-Dominican relations.
A former fellow in the U.S. Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) (May 2013), he taught International and European Human Rights Law (DIEDH) and Introduction to Law at the Institut Régional de Formation Sanitaire et Sociale (IRFSS, Lyon, France) from 2019 to 2022. He has volunteered for the French Red Cross's International Humanitarian Law (IHL) dissemination department (2018-2022) and for the Unesco Chair at the Catholic University of Lyon (2018-2023). His research interests include international migration law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law and conflict management.
Thomas Windisch holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in law from UdeS. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center for Research in Constitutional Law at the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels while completing his internship at the Barreau du Québec under the supervision of Pre. Alexandra Popovici. He is also coordinator of the Research Chair in Law, Religion and Secularism, researcher at the CRDG and member of the LRCD. His areas of expertise are mainly legal epistemology, philosophy of law, legal theory and sociology of law. Having notably published a book of poetry and having dealt with the links between Kantian philosophy and the work of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, some of his research is part of the Law and Literature movement. He is interested in several distinct themes, including civil disobedience, legal awareness among LGBTQ activists, transformations of normativity, property law and issues related to legal language in all its forms.
Josiane holds a Bachelor or laws and a Master of business administration from the Université de Sherbrooke as well as a Master of laws from the University of Ottawa, where she studied the taxation of sugar-sweetened beverages from a food justice perspective. Josiane is currently pursing a doctoral degree in law. She is interested in the fields of food law, consumer law, health law and insurance law, namely. Her thesis project relates to access to healthy diets. In addition to working as a research assistant and teaching assistant, Josiane is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Sherbrooke.
Roshdi holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in public and international law from the ULB. His dissertation looked at freedom of expression on Twitch in the light of the European Charter of Human Rights. He then had the opportunity to continue his studies by doing a specialised master's degree in international law at the ULB, where he wrote a dissertation on the international responsibility for the acts committed by the Wagner group during the Moura massacre. His interests revolve around theories of international law and international justice. In this context, he would like to do a thesis on the development of law at the International Court of Justice.
Stéphanie Roy is an assistant professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. She teaches administrative law, the law of administrative tribunals and animal law. In addition to these fields, her research focuses on environmental governance and critical approaches to environmental law. She is particularly interested in the State's fiduciary obligations to protect the environment in the interests of future generations, and the ability of the courts and the law to deal with the ecological transition. Professor Roy is also a director of the Centre québécois du droit de l'environnement and a member of its legal committee.
Noémie Boivin is a postdoctoral intern at the Université de Sherbrooke's Faculty of Law and coordinator of the Laboratoire pour la recherche critique en droit. She holds a doctorate in law from the Benemérita Universidad Autonónoma de Puebla, a master's degree in law from the Université du Québec à Montréal and a bachelor's degree in international relations and international law from the same university. She was a visiting doctoral student at the École de droit de Sciences Po Paris and a visiting researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Sur (San Cristóbal/Tapachula, Mexico). Noémie is interested in the legal categories of international migration, the intersection between the immigration and asylum systems, the decolonial perspective and legal ethnography in the Mexican context. Her doctoral research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, explored the dichotomy between migration regularity and irregularity in the case of foreign women at Mexico's southern border (Tapachula). Her postdoctoral project is entitled Contention humanitaire de la migration irrégulière : ethnographie juridique en territoires de transit au Mexique.