51吃瓜网

By Marian Daubioul

On 16 October 2025, the Paul-Andr茅 Cr茅peau Centre for Private and Comparative Law and the Wainwright Chair in Civil Law had the honour of hosting a symposium entitled 鈥淒ecolonizing Comparative Law.鈥� This event, the third in the four-part series 鈥�(Re)Thinking Quebec Civil Law in its Contexts,鈥� supported by the Notarial Studies Fund of the Chambre des notaires du Qu茅bec, sought to promote and explore a pluralist approach to comparative law that is lucid about its colonial roots and capable of faithfully articulating normative diversity.

Professor Marie-脠ve Arbour (Universit茅 Laval) first outlined the state of research on the intertwining of comparative law and colonialism, calling for critical reflexivity toward the coloniality of the discipline. The latter, conventionally 鈥渂orn鈥� at the 1900 Paris Congress in a positivist and imperial context, sought to reconnect law and social life without recognizing Indigenous pluralities. The decolonial turn exposes the structural nature of this blind spot by revealing the persistence of categories that reproduce colonial hierarchies. Deconstructing this legacy requires undoing its epistemological and methodological frameworks in order to create a genuinely plural space for dialogue; it therefore calls for a critical positionality that amplifies Indigenous voices without appropriating them, and for methodological renewal that reassesses the very concept of normativity.

Professor Jorge L. Esquirol (Florida International University) then proposed the concept of 鈥渃omparative comparative law鈥� to broaden the study of legal comparison by identifying several circuits that do not adopt the methods or stakes inherited from the Paris Congress. His examples included Latin America, where legal practice, animated by a sense of belonging to a shared legal family, is intrinsically comparative; the field of law and development, which seeks to diagnose legal pathologies (disabling formalism or, conversely, excessive informality) hindering the Global South; and international financial institutions promoting harmonization and uniform formalization. 鈥淐omparative comparative law鈥� maps methods and ideologies: this disciplinary shift situates comparisons within their sites of enunciation, recentres traditional methodological debates by highlighting an irreducible plurality of contextual logics, and enables concrete positions grounded in the situated knowledge of participant-observers.

Doctoral candidate Mahamady Ou茅draogo (UQAM) compared the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), ostensibly driven by Pan-African values, with NAFTA, whose neoliberal architecture it largely follows. The AfCFTA reproduces tariff elimination, national treatment and most-favoured-nation treatment, and advances progressive liberalization; at the same time, it regulates investment with regard to the public interest, environmental sustainability and investors鈥� human-rights obligations, and its intellectual property regime protects traditional knowledge and cultural expressions. In a context marked by renewed Western protectionism and the defence of national economies (notably through CETA and CUSMA), he argued that the AfCFTA should be more deeply anchored in African realities and Pan-African ideals.

Professor Doris Farget (UQAM) called for comparative law to be anchored in its legal, cultural and social contexts. Working with the Pekuakamiulnuatsh (Mashteuiatsh) community to document narrative-based normativities toward a constitutional project, she advocated collaborative research and the co-construction of knowledge. Decolonial legal research, she argued, is relational: it rests on partnerships that jointly define roles and deliverables according to timelines and needs set by the community. Comparison should arise only when partners themselves call for it. Jurists must be aware of their position and of the limits of their work; hence the humility she urged, warning against claiming the status of 鈥渄ecolonizers鈥� of law rather than participants in the long and demanding process of reconciliation. In this spirit, researchers must cultivate ways of being and, following Vinciane Despret, allow themselves to be taught by the exchanges each situation requires.

Professor Eva Ottawa (University of Ottawa) described her own journey toward decolonizing legal thought through language. Her research on customary adoption (opikihawasowin), conducted in Manawan, brought to light a linguistic incommensurability. French cannot convey the rootedness of Atikamekw Nehiromowin in the notcimik (forest-territory) or its rich relational lexicon; and Atikamekw Nehiromowin, a vividly metaphorical, verb-centred language, has no exact equivalents for 鈥渂est interests of the child,鈥� 鈥減arental authority,鈥� 鈥渓aw鈥� or 鈥渏ustice.鈥� This inquiry was, for Professor Ottawa, a rite of passage requiring reflexive analysis grounded both in her identity as an Atikamekw jurist trained in Western law and in the discomfort of comparing fundamentally different normative orders. Recognizing linguistic incommensurability means placing Indigenous and Western legal orders on an equal footing and insisting that Indigenous voices be heard on their own terms, which is essential to the continued life of their legal traditions.

These presentations were followed, and the annual conference of the American Society of Comparative Law thereby launched, by a keynote address from professor Aaron Mills (McGill), with commentary by professor Jennifer Nedelsky (University of Toronto). Mills argued that comparison between legal traditions different in kind must accept the irreducibility of each to the assumptions, infrastructures and mechanisms of the other in order to illuminate features that comparisons within the same kind of tradition cannot disclose. His aim was to make Anishinaabek legality intelligible on its own terms so as to confront Western positive law at a deeper level.

Rejecting the idea of a single model of legality, Mills contrasted centralized and coercive Western law with 鈥渞ooted鈥� Anishinaabe law. In the Anishinaabe legal order, networks of gift-giving form the matrix of community; kinship and mutual aid distribute responsibilities rather than rights; teachings offer models of reasonable conduct; onaakonigewin, carefully formed judgment, takes the form of inductive, context-sensitive reasoning in which authority arises from relationships; and mimenotiziwin, a register of self-governance, sustains this relational order. Freedom is understood as the fulfillment of received and shared gifts, and legitimacy as 鈥減ower-with鈥� embedded in the web of relations. Transplanting Anishinaabe norms into Western legal systems uproots them and drains them of meaning; it is therefore preferable to compare functionally across kinds of legality while acknowledging their incommensurability.

Jennifer Nedelsky reformulated Mills鈥檚 argument in terms of kinship-based and citizenship-based normativity. She underlined the crucial contribution of the rooted model to the legal articulation of duties toward the more-than-human world, while emphasizing the value of a certain relational distance between individuals in large, heterogeneous societies. She advocated a reorganization of political and social life into democratically interconnected scales: norms of responsibility in human鈥搉on-human relations at local levels, and rights-based regimes in human鈥揾uman relations at more 鈥渘ational鈥� and global levels. In an era of climate crisis, she suggested, such a multi-level constitutionalism may better protect all beings.

The Paul-Andr茅 Cr茅peau Centre and the Wainwright Chair express their sincere gratitude to all speakers and moderators who made this event a success and extend particular thanks to the Notarial Studies Fund of the Chambre des notaires du Qu茅bec for its indispensable support.